The trailing slashes They are the bars that appear at the end of a URL ("https://es.ryte.com/") and represent a directory. If the URL does not end with a slash it represents a file. However, these are only guidelines, not a requirement. However, using a slash as a representation of a directory has been accepted as the standard over time.
Use of the bars "https://es.ryte.com/" and SEO
Although these bars do not have a great meaning in the URL, for SEO they are of great relevance. Fundamentally if the pages can be displayed with different numbers of bars, that is, for example when a page can be opened with none, one or two bars. In this case this would be considered a content duplicate and should be avoided. For each unique content, it should be entered using a single URL. If this happened, the web portal would lose position. This is so because when indexing the same content in several URLs, the traffic and the number of visits is divided by the number of URLs through which said content can be accessed. It is recommended to select one of the URLs and set it as "standard" for Google.
Avoid duplicate content
To prevent the same content from appearing through different URLs, the following procedure is recommended: Use the HTTP 301 response code to create a permanent domain redirect. Therefore the visitors will be redirected directly to the URL established as such.
Removal of the bars
To remove these bars from the URL, use the following code from the file .htaccess:
RewriteCond% {REQUEST_URI} ^ (. *) // (. *) $ RewriteRule. % 1 / % 2 [R = 301, L]
Importance in practice
If bars are set incorrectly, search engines may ignore the appropriate hint when using canonical tags. For this reason, the URL specified in the Canonical tag must also contain the slash if it exists. The same applies to identifying the country of URLs using hreflang or forwarding URLs using the 301 redirect. If there are no slashes in these cases, the country mapping may fail or the pages are not redirected correctly.
