Variations of a URL

[MrMedia]

Looking through analytics data and in Landing page date I see the following -

a) mysite.com/bluewidget - 100 page views
b) mysite.com/Bluewidget - 120 page views
c) mysite.com/bluewidget/ - 2000 page views

Does this mean that there are 3 versions of the same page floating around the internet?

Should I 301 a and b variations to option c?

 

[CCarter]

Setup the desired url, c, as the canonical url and you are good. This is exact scenario it was made for.

 

[MrMedia]

Thank you @CCarter

Do you think this will have had a negative effective on SEPP ranking?

None of my pages have the canonical set.

 

[CCarter]

In this case not really IMO, because it looks like, If I were to guess, two or three links - perhaps internal links, are causing this.

However setting up canonical URLs is a best practice cause people creating links to your site, whether it is you, another webmaster, or visitor that saw your content and is sharing it on a forum or in an email, there is no way to “fix” every potential problem with 301 redirects, your htaccess file would be huge and therefore slow down your loadtime since it has to get re-read for everything - images, CSS files, Js files.

It’s not practical to be “tidy perfect” especially when other users are creating links to your content, that’s why setting up the meta for canonical URLs tells Google which preferred URL you want in the search result. “Preferred” being key cause Google can do whatever it wants.

“Negative” effect - absolutely not though, it would need to be really out of control but even then Google is better than most SEOs want to give it credit for.

 

[turbin3]

In addition to what CCarter said, it is worth considering a wildcard redirect on the server side so that you can:

• Resolve trailing slashes with 301
• Resolve case sensitivity with 301

I'm not saying you should absolutely do this, as I don't know your situation. If it was me, and if I knew my site didn't have any weird pages or paths that could break from this, I would absolutely do it. #OCD The reason is, you then have all URL variations resolved (ignoring protocol or subdomain stuff for now), can maintain flow of link value, and you only ever have ONE version of a page crawlable and indexable.

Regardless, start with the canonical first, since that should be the easiest.

Also, if you're talking about Google Analytics data, you might consider adding a "Search and Replace" filter to the View(s) for that GA property. Although this isn't retroactive, moving forward, at least it would help clean your data so you only see ONE version of URLs in your reports.

With those types of filters, it's pretty easy to resolve case sensitivity to lowercase. Resolving everything to a trailing slash will take a bit of regex, but it's not too difficult. If you need help with this, let us know and we can walk you through it.

Also, one last thing. Expanding on what CCarter said, I would check any sort of sitewide links on your site, on the off chance the problem is there.