Trailing Slashes Affect SEO?

[CashCowAdv]

Question - Does Trailing Slashes Affect SEO?
Google does see https://buildersociety.com and https://buildersociety.com/ as different entities but I've read in a few forums that Google knows that they're the same w/o a redirect and regards it insignificant.

Thoughts?

 

[Stones]

Do you want to take the chance of having every page on your site duplicated and in the index? My view is to make things as clear as possible to Google and rely on Google's smarts as little as possible. And even if they did disregard one version, you would be splitting your link equity between the two versions.

 

[Samwise89]

Google does see https://buildersociety.com and https://buildersociety.com/ as different entities

How so? I'm not seeing anything like that.

The trailing slash redirects to the non-slash, in BuSo's case, as it should in every case on the homepage, and the inverse on the inner pages.

 

[Stones]

Depends on how your server is set up. By default most Nginx/Apache set ups have the forward done by default, but if you fuck with your with the htaccess or whatever it is in Nginx, you can leave yourself open to this issue. And yes.

Domain.com/page
Domain.com/page/

Are different addresses. I believe that this is not the case for the domain root though.

 

[LinkPlate]

@Stones you are overthinking it. Most website will redirect to one URL and usually with the / at the end, except for the homepage which is usually without the /

 

[Stones]

@LinkPlate I'm not over thinking it. It's possible to mess up your htaccess file(I've done it) or for devs who are unaware of the issue to build out a custom platform with the issue.

Most websites, out of the box, have it sorted for sure, but to Google the two addresses are different. And you can run into two versions of your site being indexed and the link equity being split.

You need to make sure that your site uses one or the other as a default. It's an uncommon issue, but one that if missed can fu#k you.

 

[iknowmyshit]

Most websites, out of the box, have it sorted for sure, but to Google the two addresses are different. And you can run into two versions of your site being indexed and the link equity being split.

I just joined the forum but from looking at all the posts here, I believe most of everyone here already knows this fact. I am not sure how others do it, but running an onsite audit report is a must to make sure all your SEO is legit. Never have I ever ran into the / as an issue to be honest.

Some onsite audit tools that are great:
- SEO Spider
- Ahrefs Site Audit
- Sitebulb

 

[BlackMoney]

Don't forget that your site will visit real users so look from their perspective too. I know that nowadays it's a rare to type in URL, but if you had to, would you be happy typing those slashes? And as mentioned before, it's a server config. Configure it and live a happy life without duplicate urls.