Should I switch from trailing slash to no trailing slash?

[ICON_Malta]

I have a website which has had trailing slashes added to the URLs by 301 redirects for over 3 years. However, the custom CMS does not allow navigation links to have trailing slashes. This is resulting in 301s every time a user clicks a navigation link.

The site ranks fairy well for some moderately competitive keywords.

If you were in my shoes, would you remove the forced trailing slash redirect in the .htaccess and replace it with a trailing slash removal redirect, or would you leave it like it is?

Thanks,
James

p.s. the CMS also doesn't allow canonicals.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi James,

Really sorry to hear about your problem, this kind of situation can be a real pain in the neck. If I were you, I would look for a better CMS which gives me a freedom to do a better SEO. If you still wish to continue with this CMS, you should map 301 the URLs for trailing slashes to their working locations.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vijay

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi James

The reality is that it doesn't matter whether there is a trailing slash or not at the end of your URLs. What is important is that only one version is used and preferably there is no 301 from one to the other if it can be avoided. Especially if there are live links going to one or the other on the front end of your website.

So in your case you have navigation links with no trailing slash and a forced 301 adding them on.

I would remove the htaccess code which is forcing everything to a trailing slash and then add a piece of code removing it from any inbound requests.

Clearly, all backlinks will include the slash including Google - adding the code will resolve these pretty quickly and your existing search results will flick over when they are next crawled. This will depend on the size of your website and the crawl rate. You can check this in webmasters.

Remember that if you do this the backlinks from other websites will have a trailing slash and when the hits come in the new 301 will take them to a non-trailing slash. There may be a small drop in link juice from these backlinks. (I say 'maybe' as Rand Fishkin still believes so - others swear blind there isn't) so be prepared.

You have to balance this small backlink problem with actively pointing to URLs that 301s that redirect. Any SEO will tell you that this is not good! Presumably, the sitemaps don't have trailing slashes? So your site says one thing and your sitemaps another - a nightmare.

This is a version of the code to be placed at the top:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d
RewriteRule^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R]# <- for test, for prod use [L,R=301]

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

[ThompsonPaul]

Honestly? I'd spend the time to get the Custom CMS fixed to allow trailing slashes in the navigation links. That would eliminate the redirect issue, Instead of just trading it off to another set of links that would have to redirect.

It sounds like a code sanitising issue in the CMS. Worth spending a couple of hundred dollars to fix the root cause of the issue instead of spending that money to apply bandaids that cause other problems elsewhere. (And bonus, maybe you can get proper canonicalisation built at the same time.)

Of course, yea, this does depend on having/finding a competent developer and having a test environment that doesn't endanger the live site.

Any chance you could push for this option?

Paul

[ICON_Malta]

Hi Paul, that would be the ideal fix. Unfortunately, it won't be an option for at least a couple of months. Maybe best just to wait then.

[ThompsonPaul]

I'd absolutely agree. If you can get it fixed properly in a couple of months, then leaving the status quo would e better than making interim changes that just trade one set of redirects for another.

P.