-
Canonical Change
Posted by on September 5, 2025 at 12:50 pmQuick one, I’ve had a dev team re build an already established website on a new CMS for us.
We’ve now launched and I’ve seen they’ve set the canonicals to have no trailing slash instead of what we had previously with a slash.
This is essentially new URLS for all pages right as they didn’t redirect the old pages?
We haven’t grown since launch mid last month, could this be the reason with crawlers thinking all pages are new?
-
1 Reply
-
When you say canonicals, do you mean the actual canonical tags? Or the actual page URLs?
What do you see in GSC when you look at indexing?
-
well, you’d have a word or 30 with your dev team.
Anyway, while this is NOT a replacement for properly done work, here you go, free of charge
`RewriteEngine On`
`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f`
`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}$`
`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$`
`RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1/ [L,R=301]`
add this to your `htaccess` file and problem fixed
As for this:
>We haven’t grown since launch mid last month, could this be the reason with crawlers thinking all pages are new?
Maybe, you didn’t provide any info at all so who knows, but it’s a possibility
-
Yes, that’s terrible. Revert to old structure asap. Second best option is 301s.
-
Changing the slash structure without redirects forces crawlers to treat every page as new which resets equity and stalls growth until the signals consolidate.
Log in to reply.