Trailing Slashes on Home Pages

[eventurerob]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[Alex-Harford]

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.

[eventurerob]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[eventurerob]

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/ .

[Marcus_Miller]

That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.

This pretty much details it in full:

To slash or not to slash

[Alex-Harford]

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?

[Marcus_Miller]

Totally agree, it's kind of a non issue, improve the canonical if you can but really, don't sweat it.