As we stepped into the new year, it is imperative to take all the necessary technical SEO stuff well-aligned with our SEO campaigns. It is high time to find out any existing inconsistencies in the current SEO journey. Thus, in this context, we are going to unleash the steps to clear up any inconsistent indexing with trailing / non-trailing slash.
In order to perform the steps, do the following.
Step 1:
Go to Google Search Console
Step 2:
Open your URL/Domain property, go to performance and select the last 16 months, as shown below:
Step 3:
Select PAGE FILTER and use MATCHES REGEX and put in .*\/$ – then export the URLS
Here’s the output:
Step 4:
Then change to DOESN’T MATCH REGEX and leave .*\/$
in place and export (if URLs exist)
Here’s the output:
If you find loads of auxiliary / JUMP Links you can amend the regex to
.*\/$.*\#$
Action to be taken:
Once you are done with exporting URLs from both – you should then HTTP check the non-default protocol.
Make sure to double-check before removing any URLs from the live website, if it is irrelevant to your campaign only then you should remove it or else keep it as it is.
Sidenote:
1. Always force a trailing slash / non-trailing slash and make it consistent
2. Do not rely on canonicals
3. Make sure your internal linking sitewide is consistent – crawl your website with Screaming Frog SEO spider and use the INLINKS option on any URLs where there is inconsistency as shown below:
4. If you switched from trailing to non-trailing or vice versa – run an AHREFS BATCH ANALYSIS on the OLD URL paths to see which have external links (in case you do not have a redirection in place).
