Posts not appearing on Google Search and trailing slash (/) on posts in sitemap-posts.xml

Using Ghost
1

Hello,
Ghost is a great software. We love using it at our startup and so far had really good experience. We are self-hosting Ghost under our domain (domain.com/blog structure).

I got tricked by canonical URLs though. Initially, I added them and kept asking myself why those blog posts are not getting indexed. I found that one must NOT add them in order for posts to show up in sitemap-posts.xml.

I removed them from my posts but whenever I generate sitemap-posts.xml, there is always trailing slash (/).

Our of four posts, Google has indexed two with trailing slash (/) and other two without slash.

I want to ask what is the right way to create posts and have them show up on Google in 4-5 days? My biggest concern is not being indexed by Google.

  1. When a post is created, then is a field called “Post URL”. Should that URL have trailing slash or no?
  2. Is my understanding correct that we must not add Canonical URL? These are posts written my us and there are no third-party authors.

I would appreciate if anyone who knows how to get indexed by Google properly can answer these questions.

2
  1. No trailing slash there, it’s just a “slug” which is typically automatically created from the post title, you shouldn’t need to touch it unless you want a different post URL. By default the URL format is https://yoursite.com/{slug}/ but that can be modified via a custom routes.yaml file
  2. Correct, the canonical URL field is for when you have a copy of a post on your site where the canonical version lives elsewhere. If you leave it blank then the post on your site is considered canonical and will have the correct tags for that and appear in your sitemap