Missing trailing slash in URL on subpages resulting in Moz PA of 1

serverleap

Even here in moz community I am noticing it. Is it really a factor to have an ending slash on the page? Does it make a difference? Our website has a homepage PA of 63, DA of 56 but all of our sub-pages are just 1 and they have been up for 4 months.

BlueprintMarketing

Are your subpages subdomains? Or subfolders? I'm going to assume they are subfolders.

If you're domain authority changes because of your page, that would be the only thing that would make me think you're talking about a subdomain.

PA 63 & DA 56 your site will be crawled quickly because it has decent domain authority just because your homepage has high page authority does not mean the rest of the site will.

It is not unusual for a brand-new page to have little page authority you can check if your forward slash "/" is being forced use screaming frog, redirect mapper, or https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/

You can then force a "/" or prevent one depending on what you find. Using regex

Name: Redirect my contact page
Domain: www.domain.com
Source: ^/old-path/contact-us/?$
Destination: /new-path/contact-us/
Redirect type: 301 Permanent

This Redirect Rule will match a URL of _http://www.domain.com/old-path/contact-us_ -or- _http://www.domain.com/old-path/contact-us/_
The variation is because of the Regex Syntax “/?$”
The Question Mark “?” makes the Trailing slash Optional
It will also only match the Source if it Starts with a “/” (note the carrot “^” ), or ends with either “s” or “/” (note the ending “$” )

https://wpengine.com/support/regex/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16657152/matching-a-forward-slash-with-a-regex

This depends on your server, and what language are using so, I strongly suggest you use tool to verify your changes before making them.

https://regex101.com/r/oK8xL9/1

http://www.regexpal.com/

I hope this helps,

Tom

serverleap

Unfortunately this does not quite answer the question. The structure is by design but I am having my second thoughts after reviewing Moz and seeing this occurrence. Why are all sub-directories which do not end with / have a moz trust of 1? This even occurs here in the community forum. When the DA is 56 and the pages have been around for four months and are all linked from the homepage shouldn't they have a PA? Is the lack of a trailing slash a factor?

https://www.ultrawebhosting.com

Ex:
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/about
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers

BlueprintMarketing

thank you for providing me with that URL I will take a look right now

BlueprintMarketing

You have 2

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Server: UltraSpeed Hosting by UltraWebHosting.com

Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2016 08:06:06 GMT

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 34133

Connection: keep-alive

Vary: Accept-Encoding

Last-Modified: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 05:37:53 GMT

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

X-Cache: HIT from Backend

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Intro to HTTP

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

BlueprintMarketing

Look at this http://cl.ly/faXF

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ultrawebhosting.com%2Fdedicated-servers

compare with

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ultrawebhosting.com%2Fhosting-dedicated.php

It is still showing up with .php

https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/hosting-dedicated.php needs to 301 to

https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/

Its the .php & different link that has back links to it that is not properly pointing to it. Check

BlueprintMarketing

Try //Rewrite to www

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ultrawebhosting.com[nc]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ultrawebhosting.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

//301 Redirect Old File

Redirect 301 .php /

See http://www.askapache.info//2.3/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch

Sorry for all the duplicate stuff everything posts that way is annoying sorry about that. Nevertheless, you have to remove the PHP from your site. And redirect it correctly.

Let me know if that helps,

See below

|

Purpose

|

Example formatting

Include an entire directory but nothing beneath it

|

http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/

^/shop/?$

Include all subdirectories

|

http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/*

^/shop/.*

Include a single file

|

http://www.yourdomain.com/shop.php

^/shop.php

Include any file of a specific type

|

^/shop/.*.php – any php file

|

serverleap

Hello Thomas,

Thank you for your time.

Redirect 301 /hosting-dedicated.php https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers

has been set since 01/02/16 via .htaccess

I have removed the duplicate access-control as one was arbitrating font extensions and the other everything.

BlueprintMarketing

Was not able to fix the problem? If not you may want to force a / with a /?$ that way it will only be forced if needed.

Hope that helps, Tom

serverleap

The original question is if it is a factor for the trialing slash to not exist as I am seeing Moz PRs of 1 on these pages after four months.

I appreciate all the rewrites but this is all common knowledge to me.

BlueprintMarketing

It's because there are back links pointing to the URLs that you redirected to dedicated servers for instance. The others have no back links therefore they do not have any page rank.

serverleap

The 301 redirect has existed for 4 months and a day. Why has it not assumed PR with Moz?

BlueprintMarketing

The 301 has to point to the / it shows PA

I'm about to grab dinner when I get back I will do it deep crawl your site and I'll find out the problem for you because it's definitely not a hard issue to figure out and I will dedicate some time to find out.

BlueprintMarketing

I did not show what the PA was when I dropped the /

its 0 but when I add it is PA 28 see & try it.

Video of what I'm saying http://cl.ly/faXF

BlueprintMarketing

Found it your non-https .php URL has backlinks & you are 301 redirecting it to the "/" URL.

After that redirects to the non-/. Thus creating a redirect chain

You need to redirect the non-HTTPS version of the site/URL to the non-/ version of the site. This will give you the domain and page authority that you are missing.

I confirmed the back links using majestic.com

Result

http://www.ultrawebsitehosting.com/hosting-dedicated.php backlinks
301 Moved Permanently
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/
301 Moved Permanently
https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers lost PA when redirected so many times.
200 OK

HTTP Headers

http://www.ultrawebsitehosting.com/hosting-dedicated.php

301 Moved Permanently

https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers/

301 Moved Permanently

https://www.ultrawebhosting.com/dedicated-servers

200 OK

Features

This Redirect Checker supports several features like:

· Select different User Agents like
   · Desktop-Browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox,...)
   · Mobile Devices (IPad, Iphone, Android, Windows Phone, Kindle, Nokia...
   · Search Engine Bots (GoogleBot, Google Mobile Bot, Yandex, BingBot, Baidu, Yahoo Slurp, Naver,...
· checking 302 and 301 redirects
· supports & checks https redirects
· checks meta refresh redirects
· analysis of common javascript redirects
· check and show redirect chains
· check http headers like Status Code, X-Robots-Tag, Rel Canonical Header Tag "Link:"

serverleap

Brilliant!

Thank you so much Thomas!!! I will see what I can do about cleaning this all up!

I believe I have located it the issue. The redirects are occurring after a base rewrite rule:

Rewrite URLs to / from .html. SEO friendly. Added by David Turner 12/26/15

RewriteBase /

Rewrite requests for index.php to directory to avoid 500 errors when added to paths. Added by David Turner 12/30/15

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

remove the .html extension

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.).html\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.).html$ $1 [R=301]

remove index and reference the directory

RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301]

remove trailing slash if not a directory

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301]

forward request to html file, but don't redirect (bot friendly)

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$
RewriteRule (.*) $1.html [L]

Moving the 301s above these and cleaning these up a bit should restore the 301 redirects properly and regain Moz PA.

BlueprintMarketing

<code class="language-htaccess" style="padding: 2px 6px; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; border-radius: 3px; text-shadow: #ffffff 0px 1px; word-break: normal; word-wrap: normal; tab-size: 4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial;">Glad I can help 
Try useing this to check it  

http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php </code>

`#removes trailing slash if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]

or
https://css-tricks.com/snippets/htaccess/remove-file-extention-from-urls/

Take the / off the end of this
https://regex101.com/r/oK8xL9/3 like this` ^((?:\w+/\w+)+)$

Seach & replace might be needed

<code class="language-htaccess" style="padding: 2px 6px; border: 0px; border-image-source: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-width: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; margin: 0px; border-radius: 3px; text-shadow: #ffffff 0px 1px; word-break: normal; word-wrap: normal; tab-size: 4; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial;">Hope that helps,
Tom</code>

obO0B3d.png

BlueprintMarketing

Hope this helps,

Please see: https://github.com/blueprintmrk/htaccess

&

https://github.com/blueprintmrk/htaccess#redirect-using-redirectmatch

Removing "/." from .PHP URLs "win-win"

Alias “Clean” URLs

This snippet lets you use “clean” URLs -- those without a PHP extension, e.g. example.com/users instead ofexample.com/users.php.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

Remove Trailing Slash

This snippet will redirect paths ending in slashes to their non-slash-terminated counterparts (except for actual directories), e.g. http://www.example.com/blog/ to http://www.example.com/blog That is important for SEO since it’s recommended to have a canonical URL for every page.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]

Force HTTPS

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

# Note: It’s also recommended to enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
# on your HTTPS website to help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
# See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/HTTP_strict_transport_security
 <ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains"</ifmodule>

Force HTTPS Behind a Proxy

Useful if you have a proxy in front of your server performing TLS termination.

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

PS

checkout

https://www.nginx.com/products/ they are great!

Tom

Alias “Clean” URLs

This snippet lets you use “clean” URLs -- those without a PHP extension, e.g. example.com/users instead ofexample.com/users.php.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

serverleap

The redirect checker website is excellent. Great find!

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.