Slash at end of URL causing Google crawler problems

[onetwentysix]

Hello,

We are having some problems with a few of our pages being crawled by Google and it looks like the slash at the end of the URL is causing the problem.  Would appreciate any pointers on this.

We have a redirect in place that redirects the "no slash" URL to the "slash" URL for all pages. The obvious solution would be to try turning this off, however, we're unable to figure our where this redirect is coming from.  There doesn't appear to be an instruction in our .htaccess file doing this, and we've also tried using "DirectorySlash Off" in the .htaccess file, but that doesn't work either.  (if it makes a difference it is a 302 redirect doing this, not a 301)

If we can't get the above to work, then the other solution would be to somehow reconfigure the page so that it is recognizable with the slash at the end by Google.  However, we're not sure how this would be done.

I think the quickest solution would be to turn off the "add slash" redirect.  Any ideas on where this command might be hiding, and how to turn it off would be greatly appreciated.  Or any tips from people who have had similar crawl problems with google and any workarounds would be great!

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

What type of server is your site hosted on? Is it Windows or Apache? Is it shared hosting, VPS or dedicated?

What type of site do you have? Is there a CMS or other software which may modify or rewrite URLs?

[onetwentysix]

Hi Ryan -- thanks for your help.

We're hosted on a VPS, running Linux/Apache.  We use Satchmo as our CMS/shopping engine.   As far as I know, we haven't put explicit redirect instructions into the CMS.  Do you think the CMS may be adding the slash?

[RyanKent]

I think we should rule out the possibility that your CMS or a SEO extension or other add-on for your CMS is adjusting your URLs.

Can you add a page to your site at your root that is not part of your CMS? Drop in a test.html file and see what happens.

[onetwentysix]

Thanks, Ryan -- we're taking a look into this right now, and will let you know how it goes!

[StalkerB]

Satchmo does this automatically - http://www.satchmoproject.com/docs/dev/configuration.html?highlight=trailing slash - however, as far as I can see from the documentation and forums there's no way to disable it

I'm unfamiliar with Satchmo though, hit up the Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/satchmo-users/topics -  and ask there.