Magento 1 adds a trailing slash at the end of CMS page

Question

I am using Magento 1.9 and I have a problem with one of my CMS pages. I found out that the page is available under two versions:

• www.example.com/MyCMSpage

• www.example.com/MyCMSpage/

I am not sure why the trailing slash at the end of URL is there. The settings under Admin > CMS > Pages > MyCMSpage > Page Information > URL Key is without the /.

Google sees this as two different pages.

How can I solve the problem without damaging the SEO of the page?

I can't add a canonical link to the page with / at the end because it doesn't exist in the admin area, however, is accessible via web and points to the same content as the URL without the /.

Will a 301 redirect solve the problem without any SEO damage?

Answer 1

Yes, regardless of how this is being added, a 301 redirect of

www.example.com/MyCMSpage/

to

www.example.com/MyCMSpage

should solve the issue without it affecting your SEO. Make sure you get the redirect correct so that you don't end up with a circular redirection.

Note: if the same page is listed twice in Google then Google will view one as duplicate and this could possibly affect the Pagerank of both, particularly if both are being identified as canonical. So, it is definitely worth adding the redirect to resolve this, or at least until you can find the source of the problem.

Answer 2

I managed to fix the problem pernamently by adding this to my .htaccess file:

############################################
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^GET$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/downloader.*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.+)/$
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s(.+?)/+[?\s]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301] 
############################################

Hope someone finds this useful.

Answer 3

I think it is something to do with my server configuration, but as google already listed the pages twice...

it happens on all the CMS pages.

If Google has already found and indexed both URLs then it implies there are links (somewhere) to both - either internal or inbound. Since you state that this "happens on all CMS pages" then it implies it is internal to your site. If the visible in-page links look OK, have you checked your sitemap, RSS feed etc.?

I managed to find a permanent [redirect] solution

This is a Magento issue, not a server one. If this is the case, then implementing a redirect is only a band-aid fix and not ideal if users are finding and navigating via these erroneous URLs (users will be constantly redirected and your access logs will be polluted with 301 redirects - this might, however, give you a clue as to how these URLs are being discovered). You will not be helping search engines by linking to URLs that are being redirected (if that is really what is happening).

To fix this properly you need to find where these erroneous URLs are coming from and fix at source. (Still keep the 301 redirect for SEO, since they have already been indexed.)

This isn't a server issue because...

• Servers don't magically generate links to your pages.

• It's not the server that makes these "virtual/CMS" URLs accessible. It would only be the server if these URLs mapped to physical files/directories on the filesystem (in which case the server controls additional pathname information and directory slashes).

  It is the CMS that controls whether "virtual/CMS" URLs (eg. /foo/bar and /foo/bar/) map to the same resource at the time the URL is routed through the CMS. It is the CMS that decides whether to accept or reject one or the other or both. In fact, the CMS needs to take additional steps to ensure this happens.