Trailing Slashes in links etc

[jarvi]

I've been playing around with the ScreamingFrog SEO tool that Gary mentioned in another post and have a quick question that I can't seem to find answered anywhere.

I'm getting both mydomain.com/ and mydomain.com returning 200 status codes. There's a specific page on the google blog about trailing slashes however it deals more with folders and pages, not specifically the index page. Well, it actually says you can't redirect the index page and even Chuck Norris can't do it.

For sites I code from scratch I always put the trailing slash in the links, although for Wordpress ones I don't have the same control.

Therefore, should I be worried that both these appear? If it is a problem, what's the best solution?

[mobileslot4u]

domain.com/somepage/ is not the same as domain.com/somepage, as far as I know.

Google Analytics treats these as separate pages.

I would guess that Google Search Engines treat them separately when distributing PageRank, too.

I would choose one format & stick to it!

[jarvi]

It's fine for me to stick to one format which I do, however, that doesn't mean the search engines do the same.

The problem with this page on the Google Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-to-slash.html) is that they don't say much about the root url except for the following line:

If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:
Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay.
Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

To me that implies it's not a problem and I can't do anything about it any way. Just looking for other people's thoughts so I can confirm my own thinking and also consider other search engines.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

I actually ran some testing on this a couple years back and url's with trailing slashes tended to be prominent, but with the canonical rel tag it ended, which is what you should be using anyhow. Even worse is when I see a site with multiple/duplicate pages with variable extensions like .com, .com/index, .com/index.htm, etc. because not only does this confuse Google but they may also pick the wrong page as your primary because of internal and external links pointing to it. I see this happening mostly with internal links though, but either way if you have 100 links with half going to one and half to the other you are splitting the benefits they offer. On your index page go into WMC and name your primary domain selection.

[jarvi]

Thanks Gary. Definitely only have the .com and .com/ and no other variations.

Does raise another question though. If I have the non-www redirected to www (or vica versa) using htaccess, is it a good idea to still set the preferred domain in WMC?

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

I always use google methods for canonicalisation as well as geotargeting (where applicable) but htaccess resolves this issue as well. 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Google most likely added this control to accomodate non-coders.

[jarvi]

Thanks. I forgot to thank you for the other post where you recommended the SEO tool and all the other information, so thanks for that too. Good to have it all in one place.

Also good to have a tool that works on a Mac as I didn't want to run anything extra in order to get Xenu going.

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Yea I've struggled using Macs. I use Crossover but its not 100%

[jarvi]

I looked at WineBottle yesterday as some-one uses that to run Xenu and people say it doesn't open things up to Windows type issues. Still prefer not to run anything Windows if possible. Not anti-Windows, just don't want to potential add vulnerabilities and even more so in light of the problems at this forum over the last few days.

[smithjenny]

good explanation at google webmaster central blog. Thanks for sharing

It's fine for me to stick to one format which I do, however, that doesn't mean the search engines do the same.

The problem with this page on the Google Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-to-slash.html) is that they don't say much about the root url except for the following line:



To me that implies it's not a problem and I can't do anything about it any way. Just looking for other people's thoughts so I can confirm my own thinking and also consider other search engines.