· Quick Take · 2 min read
Canonical URLs and the Trailing Slash: What to Share
For websites and profiles, choose the platform's default or your own canonical, then use it everywhere to keep signals consolidated.
Pay attention to the trailing slash in your social and website links. Usually, only one of them is the right one.
It all starts with Google. They treat a URL with and without the trailing slash separately, i.e. /page/ and /page are ranked independently. This means it may split signals and weaken both. Consolidating them into a single one is a lot better for your ranking.
The footprint of you and your business on the internet can be divided into two: ones you own, e.g. your homepage and business pages, and ones owned by platforms, e.g. your social media profiles or e-commerce sites. For those owned by platforms, pay attention to the www and the trailing slash when sharing. For example:
- LinkedIn: with slash, https://www.linkedin.com/in/username/
- X (Twitter): without slash, without www, https://x.com/username
- Facebook: with slash, https://www.facebook.com/username/
- Instagram: with slash, https://www.instagram.com/username/
- Threads: without slash, https://www.threads.com/@username
- TikTok: without slash, https://www.tiktok.com/@username
- YouTube: without slash, https://www.youtube.com/@username
Why this matters: platforms usually pick a default format and redirect the other one. For example, if you remove the last / in your own LinkedIn URL and hit enter, it will come back. That is because LinkedIn automatically redirects to the default one with a slash. By choosing the default one for each social media site to share, you avoid splitting traffic between two versions.
For websites you own, you can choose with or without a slash. Just be consistent everywhere. To know which is the current canonical one of your sites, use the same trick above. If it is not the one you like, you can change it, depending on which framework or service you are using to host your sites. For me, I always prefer without a slash as it is cleaner.
Note: The only exception is a root domain, i.e. website.com and website.com/ are identical, so no need to worry about a slash there.
