Magento Trailing Slash URL Problem

[MozAddict]

Howdy Mozzers!

Our magento store URL's are accessible with or without a trailing slash at the end. Canonical's and 301 redirects are not set up for one of them at the moment.

Will this cause duplicate issue? Do we need to set canonical or 301 up? Which one is recommended?

MozAddict

[TheeDigital]

Definitely a duplication issue as they are 2 different pages.  Pick one way and stick to it, probably remove is the easiest.  I would do redirects first, but set canonical as well as a best practice.  There is a great guide here:

http://www.kodecreations.co.uk/google/remove-trailing-slash-magento-urls-duplicate-content-issue/

It even includes instructions on how to stop Magento from generating urls with trailing slashes.

[mosquitohawk]

Good day MozAddict!

SEO for Magento is near and dear to my heart.  From a technical SEO perspective, I would recommend cleaning up the items you mentioned as it can cause issues.  The biggest concern is trust flow and having trust split between two versions of the page (ie: the slash and no-slash).

So both the 301 and canonical tag will pass the same amount of trust as the other.  So your question is, which do you go with?  I think both are fine however I prefer the 301 myself for dealing with the trailing slash issue and here's why.

As time passes, believe it or not, people will link to some of your pages naturally.  Because a canonical or 301 doesn't pass the full trust earned from the link, I'd rather someone link to the correct version.  If I'm using the canonical tag, they may indeed link to the non-preferred version and I would lose some of that trust, whereas if I am using the 301, they will automatically be shown the correct, preferred version and I earn all the trust from that natural link.

Moz has a great article on canonicalization if you want to read more on it.

Hope this answer is useful to you!

[MozAddict]

Great answers guys! I would personally also prefer 301's over canonicals. So the next questions is, to keep URLs with the trailing slash or without the trailing slash. I tend to lean towards without, since most URL's are indexed that way already, its easier on the eyes, and people tend to link that way.

Any preference?

[mosquitohawk]

I personally prefer the slash but it doesn't make any difference as long as you're consistent and if as you say Google is already indexing most without, I'd probably go that way too!

[MozAddict]

Appreciate your response Marty.

What is your opinion on content for category pages. Currently we have the same content displaying on paginated pages for the same category (?p=1, ?p=2, etc)

Should we display content just on the first page and remove it for rest of the pagination or is this ok?

We are using rel="next/prev" but not sure if this is treated as duplication?

[mosquitohawk]

If you are using rel canonical then you can have the same on each page and it should be okay.

Otherwise, I would make sure your paginated pages don't have it.  The next/prev helps Google to understand these are subsequent pages of the original category but it doesn't really give instruction as to the preferred page, etc. (like the canonical would) so you could end up with Google ignoring the content after it sees it too many times.

[MozAddict]

Ok, so we could canonical the first page in the pagination, that way any links to the pagination would flow juicy juice to the first page. That would make sense, since it would strengthen its ranking as a landing page as well.

I think ill implement the canonical and get rid of the content on pagination anyways, just avoid the problem completely.

Ace Marty!