OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.

[rock22]

Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not.  When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL".  Why would that be?

The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us.

Is this anything I need to worry about?  I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Kellibean,

So technically, a folder with a trailing slash is different from one without. Although in reality search engines will hardly ever ding you for this, it's best practice to have one version redirect to the other.

For example, if you try to access http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ (with the trailing slash) it will drop the slash through a 301 redirect. This practice dates back to the old days of SEO when search engines weren't as sophisticated, and these 2 urls could be misinterpreted as duplicate content. Even though it is not as big of a problem today, it's still best practice (and I recommend) to do so.

OSE operates under these strict rules, so when it says "No Data Available" that means it has no link data available for that exact URL, even if it has data for it's trailing slash sister.

That said, without knowing the URL, it's hard to say why OSE detects a redirect. Sometimes what's visible in your browser doesn't match the server header information. I'd do a crawl of your site with Screamng Frog (free version) and check all your server headers, or use the MozBar to do it one at a time.

If you have a question about a particular URL and how it interacts with any SEOmoz tool, feel free to contact the Help Team (help@seomoz.org) and they can look into the issue for free.

Best of luck.

[rock22]

Thank you so much for the great response.  I figured out why it is redirecting but now I'm even more confused.

The URL www.example.com redirects to www.example.com/folder/US.  The URL www.example.com/folder/us (lowercase letters) redirects to the version with the trailing slash - www.example.com/folder/us/.

So apparently in OSE I typed in the lowercase version.  Either way, they have a lot of different versions out there.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Okay, not to make everything more complicated, but it's generally best practice to force rewrite everything to lower-case. Technically, uppercase and lowercase URLs are different addresses, which gives way to duplicate content issues. That said, in the real world I've rarely seen this make much of an impact - it's more a case of crossing your T's and dotting your i's.

As an easier alternative to redirects and forcing lowercase, it might be easier to implement rel=canonical tags on all of these pages. This would tell search engines which version of the URL was "correct" and not worry about the others.

So all of these URLs:

www.example.com/folder/US
www.example.com/folder/US/
www.example.com/folder/us
www.example.com/folder/us/

... would have the same canonical tag in the

Make sense? Hope I'm not adding additional confusion to the situation.

[rock22]

It makes perfect sense, thank you!