How Trailing Slash on URLs Affect SEO – Clarification from Google

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

Duplicate content is a big deal for SEO.

Different versions of same content on your website can create big SEO issues, and if not dealt with properly, can lead to SEO disasters.

Trailing slashes have been notorious in creating duplicate content. SEOs have been asking the question about whether additional slashes at the end of URL create duplicate content or not.

It may not appear to be a big deal but if not fixed, trailing slashes can mean disaster. But it wasn’t sure what Google’s take was on this.

Would having a trailing slash on the homepage, mean it’s duplicate content?

Well, there’s some official confirmation on this now from Google’s John Mueller.

According to his tweet..

The key learnings are that…

• Trailing slashes on root domains/host name doesn’t matter. (Ex: abc.com/ is ok and same as abc.com)
• However trailing slashes everywhere else will mean either duplicate or unique content. (Ex: abc.com/directory is not the same as abc.com/directory/)

It’s good to have some clarification on this finally, from Google. Thanks John!