Trailing Slashes on Home Pages
-
I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed...
I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/
The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com
Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without.
I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.
-
Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.
-
Oh yes, thanks for that. I've read that page a few times. :S
Apologies for the confusion Alex.
Don't have a crisis of confidence anyway! If there's a canonical 99 times out of 100 (probably more) I'm sure Google would get this right whether it's the homepage or not.
What server is the site hosted on Alex? Or are the URLs controlled by a CMS?
-
That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.
This pretty much details it in full:
-
Hi Alex
Ah, crisis of confidence again!
I didn't think that this was the case though for the index page. I thought normalisation meant they were treated as the same page. As Marcus said, I can't 301 the example.com page to example.com/ .
-
Hey,
in an ideal world, make sure it is has no trailing slash. But, as per the Google specific recommendations, make sure both resolve as a 200 OK rather than redirecting / to non /.
Think about it -
The browser removes the trailing slash. Also, go to any big site, Google, SEOMoz - the all have no slash. But.. check it in webbug and they resolve on both.
For me, having a trailing slash on the root or anywhere is just something else for folks to forget to add if they are linking or some such.
Here I would just remove the trailing slash in your canonical if you can just to be sure but the usual rules don't apply on the homepage and www.example.com & www.example.com/ are regarded as the same thing.
I have constant crisis of confidence - i often wonder if I am making it up as I go along or somewhere down the history of all the hundreds of SEO audits I have done I actually learned something along the way! I have actually googled something that I was unsure about and found my own blog post about it before. I think, much like Homer Simpson, every new thing I learn now pushes out an older thing!
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus
I agree out outside of the home page it's an issue (& good answer btw) but it's only the index page I'm worried about.
It's that crisis of confidence that I'm sure we all get from time to time as to whether something rather simple/fundamental is actually as we believe it to be.
I've been re-reading this document http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 and I think it's section 3.2.6 (if I remember right) that covers normalization of the root URL's.
-
The two versions you speak of are treated as duplicate content. Ideally you should make sure the URL is the same everywhere, and 301 redirect to your preferred version. Are you sure the browser itself isn't removing the trailing slash? I know Chrome does on non-directory pages.
Saying that, if you have a canonical tag it shouldn't cause a massive problem, but it will help to do everything properly. Do everything you can to make sure all links under your control are the same version.
-
Hey Alex
There is a good overview of this here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.
The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.
This is from the above link:
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.
The big deal here is to
A - be consistent
B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Remove a page after redirection
Hi, I had page eg. www.example.com/page1 and I redirect 302 it to > www.example.com/page2 After that I fatch this page (page2) with GSC and this page was index in serp. Can I remove this old redirect page > www.example.com/page1 now? Will this remove harm my page?
Technical SEO | | Tormar0 -
Big page of clients - links to individual client pages with light content - not sure if canonical or no-follow - HELP
Not sure what best practice here is: http://www.5wpr.com/clients/ Is this is a situation where I'm best off adding canonical tags back to the main clients page, or to the practice area each client falls under? No-following all these links and adding canonical? No-follow/No-index all client pages? need some advice here...
Technical SEO | | simplycary0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Home page URL
Hi, I work on this site: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/about-us. This is the home page URL. Should this be 301'd to: http://www.towerhousetraining.co.uk? I have created a site map, which I submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, which includes these URL's: /about-us, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. There are a total of 3 pages on the website. Webmaster tools has only indexed 2 out of 3 pages. I think this is something to do with the /about-us URL, as when I do a site: search, these pages appear: www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/, /training-we-offer & /contact-us. I am not sure why Google has indexed the home page as www.towerhousetraining.co.uk/ and not /about-us? Is it a bad idea in general not to have your homepage as your root domain? I added a to the homepage, but am wondering if this was the right thing to do? Any help would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | CWseo0 -
What has happened to my page rank
hi my page rank for the site www.in2town.co.uk was page rank four and then last week it went down to page rank 2 and now my page rank is 0. i really do not understand what has happened. can anyone please give me advice on what is happening
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate Page Content
I've got several pages of similar products that google has listed as duplicate content. I have them all set up with rel="prev" and rel="next tags telling google that they are part of a group but they've still got them listed as duplicates. Is there something else I should do for these pages or is that just a short falling of googles webmaster tools? One of the pages: http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/walnut-countertop-9.html
Technical SEO | | JAARON0