Trailing slash URLs and canonical links

[GhillC]

Hi,

I've seen a fair amount of topics speaking about the difference between domain names ending with or without trailing slashes, the impact on crawlers and how it behaves with canonical links.
However, it sticks to domain names only.
What about subfolders and pages then? How does it behaves with those?

Say I've a site structured like this:
https://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com/page1

And for each of my pages, I've an automatic canonical link ending with a slash.
Eg. rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/page1/" /> for the above page. SEM Rush flags this as a canonical error. But is it exactly?
Are all my canonical links wrong because of that slash?

And as subsidiary question, both domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1/ are accessible. Is it this a mistake or it doesn't make any difference (I've read that those are considered different pages)?

Thanks!
G

[RobertvanHeerde]

Hi G,

Yes. domain.com/page1 and domain.com/page1**/ **are two different pages in the eyes of Google. But the canonical should fix this issue.... i don't know why SEMrush is flagging them. Maybe you can contact them and just ask?

For as far as I know, the best solution is to use just one version, and redirect the other one. So all the URL's without a slash, would be redirecting to the url with the slash. In this case, you don't have to change the canonical.

But be aware: this is what works with my sites. I don´t know all the details about your site.

So contact SEMrush first and/ore let somebody take a look at your code.

[GhillC]

Hi Robert.

I will get the code checked and most probably set that redirect rule indeed.
Many thanks for the advice!