Trailing slash in URL on SEO performance

Developer help Self-hosting
1

Hello, I recently moved to Ghost, and I observed that Ghost adds a trailing slash at the end of the URL.

When it comes to personal preference, I don’t mind whether the URLs have it or not. The problem is that I got an issue from Google - “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”.

My URLs before moving to Ghost were https://sitename.com/article-url and now they are https://sitename.com/article-url/. Will this affect my SEO/blog performance? Some pages were de-indexed already.

Thanks in advance!

2

This shouldn’t cause any issues, Ghost automatically redirects any URLs missing the trailing slash, so Google will update automatically

3

Thanks for the reply!

Ahrefs and Google started to show errors already, and I also lost some keywords. Hopefully, everything will work out in the end, so I don’t have to change the platform. Or worse, my blog dying completely.

It’d be great to have the option to select whether you want the trailing slash in the URL or not. It’d help in cases likes this, where people migrate their blogs.

4

What are your errors?

5
  • Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
  • 3XX page receives organic traffic
  • losing some keywords/positions
6

Those errors are normal and clear up within a few weeks as crawlers update their URLs. We migrated Buffer.com’s blogs from WordPress to Ghost and they actually gained rankings, despite changing all URLs on their most popular posts.

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