Should I worry about duplicate content errors caused by backslashes?

[MackenzieFogelson]

Frequently we get red-flagged for duplicate content in the MozPro Crawl Diagnostics for URLs with and without a backslash at the end. For example:

www.example.com/

gets flagged as being a duplicate of

www.example.com

I assume that we could rel=canonical this, if needed, but our assumption has been that Google is clever enough to discount this as a genuine crawl error.

Can anyone confirm or deny that?

Thanks.

[Alex-Harford]

It is considered as two different addresses, as is www.example.com and www.Example.com. You should add the canonical tag and find out how to specify your preferred version on your server too.

[RyanKent]

I agree with Alex's idea, but not the particular example.

www.mysite.com/Example and www.mysite/example are two different URLs.

You can freely capitalize any letter in the domain name and it makes no difference at all and will always return the same page as per ICANN rules which all major browsers and servers follow.

@Mackenzie, I suggest setting a rule to redirect one version of your URL to the other (with or without a slash). Notice in this moz Q&A the URL does not end in a slash. If you add a slash the site will redirect the URL. What's strange to me is rather then redirecting the URL to the version of the URL without the slash the browser is redirected to the Q&A home page. My guess is that is an error or someone got lazy, but I am typing this reply in the small hope there is a valid reason I am missing and someone will educate me

[Alex-Harford]

Thanks - well spotted, I was a bit stupid there.

And that does look like an error to me!

[firstconversion]

I would 301 and not rel canoncial. Less chance of error or things getting out of hand. Also, its the correct way to canonicalise urls. The rel canonical tag is for different situations (sorting order etc)