Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Magento Trailing Slash URL Problem
-
Howdy Mozzers!
Our magento store URL's are accessible with or without a trailing slash at the end. Canonical's and 301 redirects are not set up for one of them at the moment.
Will this cause duplicate issue? Do we need to set canonical or 301 up? Which one is recommended?
MozAddict
-
Ok, so we could canonical the first page in the pagination, that way any links to the pagination would flow juicy juice to the first page. That would make sense, since it would strengthen its ranking as a landing page as well.
I think ill implement the canonical and get rid of the content on pagination anyways, just avoid the problem completely.
Ace Marty!
-
If you are using rel canonical then you can have the same on each page and it should be okay.
Otherwise, I would make sure your paginated pages don't have it. The next/prev helps Google to understand these are subsequent pages of the original category but it doesn't really give instruction as to the preferred page, etc. (like the canonical would) so you could end up with Google ignoring the content after it sees it too many times.
-
Appreciate your response Marty.
What is your opinion on content for category pages. Currently we have the same content displaying on paginated pages for the same category (?p=1, ?p=2, etc)
Should we display content just on the first page and remove it for rest of the pagination or is this ok?
We are using rel="next/prev" but not sure if this is treated as duplication?
-
I personally prefer the slash but it doesn't make any difference as long as you're consistent and if as you say Google is already indexing most without, I'd probably go that way too!
-
Great answers guys! I would personally also prefer 301's over canonicals. So the next questions is, to keep URLs with the trailing slash or without the trailing slash. I tend to lean towards without, since most URL's are indexed that way already, its easier on the eyes, and people tend to link that way.
Any preference?
-
Good day MozAddict!
SEO for Magento is near and dear to my heart. From a technical SEO perspective, I would recommend cleaning up the items you mentioned as it can cause issues. The biggest concern is trust flow and having trust split between two versions of the page (ie: the slash and no-slash).
So both the 301 and canonical tag will pass the same amount of trust as the other. So your question is, which do you go with? I think both are fine however I prefer the 301 myself for dealing with the trailing slash issue and here's why.
As time passes, believe it or not, people will link to some of your pages naturally. Because a canonical or 301 doesn't pass the full trust earned from the link, I'd rather someone link to the correct version. If I'm using the canonical tag, they may indeed link to the non-preferred version and I would lose some of that trust, whereas if I am using the 301, they will automatically be shown the correct, preferred version and I earn all the trust from that natural link.
Moz has a great article on canonicalization if you want to read more on it.
Hope this answer is useful to you!
-
Definitely a duplication issue as they are 2 different pages. Pick one way and stick to it, probably remove is the easiest. I would do redirects first, but set canonical as well as a best practice. There is a great guide here:
http://www.kodecreations.co.uk/google/remove-trailing-slash-magento-urls-duplicate-content-issue/
It even includes instructions on how to stop Magento from generating urls with trailing slashes.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Strange URLs, how do I fix this?
I've just check Majestic and have seen around 50 links coming from one of my other sites. The links all look like this: http://www.dwww.mysite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
http://www.eee.mysite.com
http://www.w.mysite.com The site these links are coming from is a html site. Any ideas whats going on or a way to get rid of these urls? When I visit the strange URLs such as http://www.dwww.mysite.com, it shows the home page of http://www.mysite.com. Is there a way to redirect anything like this back to the home page?0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Crazy long weird URLs... help
I have a HTML website, mysite1.com, and I placed a link on the home page to another one of my sites, mysite2.com Today I checked the links to mysite2.com in Majestic and noticed 24 links coming from the mysite1.com instead of just one link. The URLs from mysite1.com that are showing in Majestic are like this mysite1.com/?epl=4donafvFK3fMXxZXMWQRQLodmPchoXCK5C7-kbBv_agkwlkJrZAoaSDVUlhqFmUqt0f8c2Q6jF6GO6DNMnbidqRsikriF-IEBEt5okmICLEB0FxP36GrsxoPGQ3SGBo1PVR7itDUA4CYmjypn5gi mysite1.com,was inherited from a friend and I believe that it was originally built in Frontpage. Can you tell me how I can get rid of these multiple links as I only want 1 showing from the home page Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0