Trailing Slash

A trailing slash is a forward slash you sometimes see at the end of a URL. You might have a URL like https://www.example.com/folder or you might see https://www.example.com/folder/. The problem is that search engines see these as two completely different pages, even though they show the exact same content. This has some serious implications for your SEO.

Duplicate content issue

If a page can be accessed with and without a trailing slash, you have a duplicate content issue. This means you have two different URLs that are competing with each other for the same keywords in search results. This can confuse search engines and make it harder for either of the pages to rank well.

Link equity issue

When you have two different URLs for the same page, anyone who links to your page might be confused. Some people might link to the URL with a trailing slash, and others might link to the one without. This means that your link equity, which is the SEO value of your links, is split in half. This can be a huge problem for your rankings.

Crawl budget issue

A crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period. If a search engine is crawling two different versions of the same page, it’s wasting its time and resources. For a small site, this might not be a big deal, but for a large site, it can be a huge problem. Our free can help you find any unwanted thin or duplicate content on your site.

User experience issues

From a user’s perspective, a trailing slash is a minor detail. However, if a user follows a link to a page with a trailing slash and it’s a different version of the page they were expecting, it can be a confusing experience. This can cause a user to leave your site, which can hurt your SEO.

Should I add or remove a trailing slash

From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t matter whether a URL has a trailing slash or not. The most important thing is that you are consistent. You should choose one version and stick with it. You should have one of the versions return a 200 status code and the other return a 301 redirect to the preferred version.

The history of trailing slashes

Historically, a URL with a trailing slash was a directory, and a URL without it was a file. Today, that distinction is no longer relevant, and you don’t need to consider it.

Use the same variant across your site

Once you have decided on a preferred URL variant, you should use it everywhere on your site. This includes in your:

• Canonical URLs
• Internal links
• Sitemap

Not using the right variant in any of these places can lead to indexing issues.

Removing trailing slashes in .htaccess (Apache)

If you are using an Apache server, you can add this code to your .htaccess file to redirect all URLs with a trailing slash to the one without:RewriteRule ^/?(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]

Adding trailing slashes in .htaccess (Apache)

If you would rather use a trailing slash in every URL, you can add this code to your .htaccess file to redirect all traffic to the URL with the trailing slash:RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [R=301,L]

Removing trailing slashes in Nginx

To remove trailing slashes on your Nginx server, you can add this line to your server configuration:rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;

Adding trailing slashes in Nginx

If you would rather use a trailing slash in every URL, you can add this line to your server configuration:rewrite ^([^.]*[^/])$ $1/ permanent;