Implement trailing slash convention

[cr101]

Website crawlers consider https://example.com/foo/ and https://example.com/foo as two separate URls.

In order to eliminate duplicate content issues and improve SEO, should epic-stack automatically redirect all slash URLs to the equivalent non-slash?
How Trailing Slashes Affect Your Website’s SEO

[kentcdodds]

100%

I've just pushed this improvement. Just copied the implementation from my own site. Thanks!

[kentcdodds]

That's a fair point. I'll keep that in mind when I teach about relative routes 👍

The fact is that users do sometimes add/remove trailing slashes, so it's better to redirect from one to the other. Most sites default to no trailing slash (maybe because they look gross... at least that's what I think) so that's what we're going to do.

[richardscarrott]

I noticed Epic Stack redirects POST requests with trailing slash.

Given it's a 301 (and not 308), I think it'll go from POST -> GET which probably isn't good? I'm guessing for SEO we only really need to worry about GET requests?

[kentcdodds]

I've not experienced an issue, but I agree it's probably wrong to redirect anything but GET requests. I'll make that change now.

Also, I highly discourage using 308. You never know what the future holds!

[richardscarrott]

Does a 301 not have the same caching risks as 308?...maybe it should be a 302?

[kentcdodds]

🤦‍♂️ You're right, this should be a 302. Fixed.

[zwhitchcox]

kentcdodds curious why only redirect if the req.path.length > 1? This means that the home page trailing slash won't be directed. Is that intentional?

[zwhitchcox]

Nevermind:

The good news is that it's not too difficult to fix issues with trailing slashes, depending on your website platform. It's important to note that root domain (often the homepage ‐ in our case https://www.onlineassetpartners.co.nz) will always resolve without a trailing slash. Google does this automatically, and you won't be able to change it.