A Small Change to Your Website for Potentially Huge SEO Gains

Can you load each page of your website with and without the forward slash on the end of the URL (AKA "trailing slash")?  

If after having a quick look at your site and you've found that the answer is 'yes', then there's one small change you can make that could yield big SEO gains. 

Although we know that search engines are smart... really smart, the way they index pages means that if you can load each page with and without the trailing slash, each version is considered as a separate page. 

What's the issue?  

From a functionality and CX/UX perspective, there's no problem here, but from an SEO point of view, this can be hurting your websites' organic rankings, meaning less clicks, conversions and ultimately, less revenue. Having two versions of every page/URL on your website creates canonical and duplicate content issues, which is frowned upon by search engines.  

Backlinks are a big ranking factor and if some of the links pointing towards a web page on your site are going to the trailing slash version and others to the non-slash version, rather than having one powerful page, the strength and benefit of the links will be split. This could be the difference between ranking on the first page or second page in the search engine organic results. 

So, what's the solution?  

Fixing this is quite easy. The most common fix is to implement a Regular Expression 301 Redirect so that when any web page is loaded, the trailing slash is removed or added to the end of the URL, meaning only one version can be accessed. 

If you're not sure how to fix this, either reach out to your web developer or get in contact with one of Revium’s experts.