Major SEO issue on IPB Pages

[Fast Lane!]

Here is a quick, real and hopefully easy SEO item to fix.  At present, there is a major SEO gap in place for IPB Pages.  For credibility, I reference John Mueller at Google.

 

In short, IPB Pages allows you to load a "page" with and without a trailing slash, resolving to the same page.  No rel cannonical in included or is a 301 redirect (desirable) to fix this issue. This results is split page rank / SEO on pages when people link to (or visit) a page with and without a trailing slash.  Here are a few pages from my Google webmaster tools that show page visits to the same page with and without a slash... which clearly illustrates the issue, and the SEO dilution.  I've redacted page views (not relevant):

Can IPB fix this?  Bump to the developers @Matt @bfarber @Lindy and others.  Thanks!

[Fast Lane!]

Suggest there be a setting to select a preferred url: with or without a trailing slash (with a backend 301 or canonical).  I would note, the menu manager forces a trailing slash on Pages... so there needs to be consistency between the two systems (both need a trailing slash or not). For the life of me I can't get a page in the menu manager to have a "non" slash link, no matter what I enter.

Hope this is a helpful request to IPB!!  I'm just trying to help everyone with this one :).

[Fast Lane!]

My personal preference is as follows:

- Pages have no trailing slash (since they are not a directory)
- Menu manager allows Pages to be listed with no trailing slash
- 301 or cannonical forces users to the right url (with or without slash)

Although, allow folks to set this "by page" would resolve everything.

[Fast Lane!]

Checking further, the sitemap always lists all IP Content Pages, pages, with a trailing slash.  But I see plenty of backlinks to non trailing slash urls that are the same page.  Webmaster tools confirms there is no canonical either manually or assumed by Google... i.e. Page Rank dilution.

[opentype]

Out of curiosity: Have you checked where these links come from? Are people manually typing the full Pages URLs on their sites and create these links this way?
Or where do these links come from? Remnants of 3.x links?

I wouldn’t really call it a “major” SEO issue unless the software really spreads both links, but sure, it definitely needs fixing.  

[Fast Lane!]

Google has also been auto selecting which canonical to use.  Sometimes it picks with and sometimes without a slash.  Woof.  They do a decent job but I already found some questionable calls.

You can use the URL Inspector tool in the new Google Webmaster Tools to examine this issue.  Check both the page with and without a slash.

[Fast Lane!]

Yep, people pasting links on other sites is part of it.  By them randomly using a trailing slash (or not) they are diluting the page rank.

Example:

website.com/faqs

website.com/faqs/

are different but point to the same page.  The user thinks it's the same.  Google thinks it is two different pages.

[Adlago]

Google's sites are the same

Example

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/

and

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb

[Fast Lane!]

9 hours ago, Adlago said:

Google's sites are the same

Example

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/

and

https://testmysite.withgoogle.com/intl/en-gb

Whoever said they had to follow their own rules!

In the end, John Mueller is "the god" that most SEO's listen to at Google when it comes to "white hat" SEO and what folks should be doing.  I simply reference his post.  If you dig into things, having two pages with no canonical (slashes count as different pages) splits your page rank and SEO.  It's a fact.

[bfarber]

I've raised your concern internally for further discussion and consideration. Thanks for pointing this out. 🙂 It appears from my (limited) testing so far that this issue only applies to standard pages, and not pages which have databases embedded (as those do set a canonical tag).