SEO gone mad...

[steve]

Thanks for all the replies - I've not been ignoring you, I'm just in a 
different timezone!

On 10/14/2015 03:16 AM, Patrick Nommensen wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 6:09 AM, Andrew Hutchings 
> <ahutchings at nginx.com <mailto:ahutchings at nginx.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi!
>
>     On Tuesday 13 October 2015 08:59:02 steve wrote:
>     > Hi folks,
>     >
>     > I have a requirement from a customer that the terminal slash be
>     > rewritten when accessing the homepage - eg example.com/
>     <http://example.com/> is a 301 to
>     > example.com <http://example.com>
>     >
>     > I've tried a simple rewrite of ^/$ but that just loops.
>     >
>     > Any ideas?
>
>     As you have seen in other answers this will be pretty much
>     impossible to get
>     right. Have you considered writing some Javascript to do it client
>     side
>     instead? Something like this:
>
>     http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10953792/change-url-in-browser-address-bar-without-reload-existing-page
>
>     At least then (in theory) you can have the illusion of hiding the
>     trailing
>     slash without risking breaking browser support for the site.
>
>
> You can set a canonical URL if your intention is for SEO. This is the 
> standard practice.
>
> https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
>
>
>     Kind Regards
>     --
>     Andrew Hutchings (LinuxJedi)
>     Senior Developer Advocate, NGINX Inc.
>
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>     nginx at nginx.org <mailto:nginx at nginx.org>
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>
>
>
>
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As can be seen from the google article, it's apparently a bad thing(tm) 
to duplicate content for example.com/ and example.com. Apparently some 
.htaccess tweak can do a 301 redirect from one to the other, but 
absolutely nothing that has been suggested ( or others that allegedly 
work - like redirecting ^/(.*)/ ) does actually work with nginx, which 
is exactly what I expected to happen.

The CMS ( it's Magento but that doesn't really make a difference ) 
rewrites the URL to the value stored in the database anyway,  but the 
'problem' is that it doesn't redirect.

As has been suggested, this is a complete non-event, as every page 
contains a canonical header entry anyway! Have suggested that client 
engages other SEO 'consultants'.

Now need to wash the snake oil out of my head (:

Thanks for your help.

Steve

-- 
Steve Holdoway BSc(Hons) MIITP
http://www.greengecko.co.nz
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/steveholdoway
Skype: sholdowa

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