Rel="canonical" of .html/ to .html

[petrakraft]

Hi,

could you guys confirm me that the following scenario is completely senseless?

I just got the instruction from an external consultant (with quiet good SEO knowledge) to use a rel="canonical" for the following urls.

http://www.example.com/petra.html/
to
http://www.example.com/petra.html

I mean a folder petra/ to petra is ok - but a trailing slash after .html ???

Apart from that I would rather choose a 301 - not a rel canonical.

What is your position here?

[TomRayner]

Hi Petra

That seems a bit weird to say the least.

I'm guessing that the consultant recommends the canonical tag to avoid a duplicate content issue with the two URLs?

Well, simply putting the canonical tag on petra.html should fix that, as it will tell Google not to index any other variant of this URL (be it with ? queries or / slashes).

Similarly, if you have links going to the petra.html/ page for whatever reason, I'd pop in a 301 redirect like you said.

Now, if they were two separate, but identical, pages that are designed to both exist for the user, the consultant would have a point. I would point a canonical on petra.html/ to petra.html, but I would actually put "noindex" and "nofollow" meta tags in the header of one of the pages first and foremost, as I believe this is more of a definitive signal.

[irvingw]

they probably made a mistake. .html is the filename, not a folder and therefor no trailing slash. I would ask them to clarify.

As a matter of fact I would even strip off the .html extension.