Issue with trailing slashes vs non-trailing causing duplicate pages

Question

I'll try my best to describe my issue here, please do ask for further info if I'm unclear or if it is required for a solution.

I've just looked at my Wordpress site in Screaming Frog and I can see that some of my older pages (about 6 months or older) have a non-trailing slash as well as a trailing slash version, my newer pages don't seem to be affected.

I need for all of the pages to have the trailing slash. I also need for there not to be any duplicate content.

Currently my non-indexable versions are also set to canonical :s oh dear..

So I suppose my perfect world solution is to have all pages end in / and for the others to simply not exist. I don't know if this is possible or not. I want to avoid 301 redirects which is why that is my perfect solution.

My other issue is somehow making my pages with the / indexable. I've set them as such using the Yoast plugin but it doesn't seem to work, I don't think that the settings for canonical tags is working either...

I hope that makes sense... Any ideas? I couldn't find this question online anywhere.

Thanks

Have you tried adding a trailing slash in Settings => Permalinks? And then save the settings to refresh your permalinks? — Hamza Ahmad, Jan 23 '19 at 04:18
Trailing Slash Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7780859/htaccess-rewrite-to-force-trailing-slash-at-the-end — Group Of Oceninfo, Jan 23 '19 at 07:10
Thanks, Hamza. This was already the case. I'm guessing something aint right in my htaccess file — Fr1nk, Jan 23 '19 at 23:17

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 23 '19 at 07:12

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Read detailed article: Add Trailing Slash to the End of the URL with .htaccess Rewrite Rules

answered Jan 23 '19 at 07:12

Group Of Oceninfo

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Thanks for the resource. I was able to fix the issue for all pages except potentially the home page, I will wait to see if propagation will show it as fixed. I will remove the unnecessary duplicate pages via phpmyadmin as I'm only starting to work on the seo so it won't really damage much. – Fr1nk Jan 24 '19 at 02:09
There really is no need to force a trailing slash when there is no path, Once you go to URL field and copy and paste in any editor it'll give you URL with / trail i.e. open https://stackoverflow.com and copy paste URL in notepad or any editor it'll give you URL like https://stackoverflow.com/ you can also check in google index it's also picking up with / in the end automatically for the home page. site:https://stackoverflow.com – Group Of Oceninfo Jan 25 '19 at 11:25

Issue with trailing slashes vs non-trailing causing duplicate pages

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