A trailing slash is the forward slash placed at the end of a URL. The trailing slash is generally used to mark a directory, and if a URL is not terminated using a trailing slash, this generally points to a file. However, these are guidelines, and not requirements. The process of setting a single trailing slash for directories has established itself as a standard over time. The slashes play an important role in search engine optimization , especially in the area of duplicate content.
Although the trailing slash in a URL does not contain concrete information, its importance in search engine optimization cannot be ignored. Using trailing slashes or not in your domain URL structure is not the reason for confusion here. Google does not care whether or not you use a trailing slash in your URLs.
The thing that does matter is how you use them — Google counts each one as a different URL. What is most important is that webmasters set up the appropriate measures to avoid duplicate content and pages contending with each other.
Managing trailing slashes accordingly means setting up the correct directs or pages rather than having both pages compete for the same rankings.
Not sure where to start? It might be worth consulting with a Sydney SEO Agency that can provide coaching or services for your business. What are trailing slashes, and how do they impact your SEO efforts? What Is a Trailing Slash? Related Posts. Google Spam Algorithm Update November The longer two separate URLs exist for one page, the higher the chances of their individual content changing.
Now think about how confusing it would be for a user to stumble across both versions, or to follow a link from an external site to an older version of your page.
Ignoring trailing slash issues just makes things more difficult for everyone: the user, search engines, and anyone else dealing with your website.
Feel free to pick either one, but this could be a decision influenced by your existing website structure. For websites with a directory structure , it makes sense to use a trailing slash.
Whatever you decide, the important part is sticking with the same convention across your whole website. A redirect is the best way to resolve duplicate content issues caused by trailing slashes. Most trailing slash issues however, affect many pages across a website. Redirecting each individual page would be time consuming, so a site-wide redirect is often the way to go. This method will also prevent the issue from cropping up again in the future.
In rare cases, a redirect is not possible or you may have reasons for avoiding it. In these situations, a canonical tag will resolve most issues.
Users may still get confused, crawl budget will remain unoptimised, and links may still exist to both versions of the page. Only use canonical tags to fix trailing slash issues when redirecting is not an option. SEO is about sweating the details. All of these questions will be answered here. A trailing slash is a forward slash commonly found at the end of a URL usually indicating a directory while those URLs not having a trailing slash would indicate a file.
Although it seems simple at first, trailing slashes have intricacies that SEOs and webmasters need to know to further optimize their website. Furthermore, he gave a helpful image to help visualize his explanation:. As can be seen in the example, F and G are not the same even though the only difference between the two is a trailing slash.
So, it can be understood as having a page without a trailing slash and having a page with the same URL slug, but with a trailing slash, are considered different pages. So in the example, I used in the earlier part of this post, if I have a page seo-hacker. So, how do these examples affect SEO?
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