Enforcing Trailing slash or not routes

[rclai]

I think it is paramount that routes enforce a trailing slash or not, in the sense that if I configure my routes to have a trailing slash, and I access the URL without the slash, that it should 301 to the one with a trailing slash. Same thing if I configure it not to have a trailing slash, that it would 301 a request with a trailing slash to the one without it.

This is important for SEO.

[samdark]

Agree that it's better behavior but don't agree that it has any impact on SEO.

[rclai]

Well, it would affect SEO if a route returned 200 on both trailing slash and without and it serves the same content. You'll get duplicate content issues.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

[samdark]

@rclai yes, but it's not the case with Yii2.

[rclai]

okay cool

[djagya]

May i make these?

[samdark]

Yes, feel free to make a pull request.

[djagya]

These "slashes or not" should be written in the routes? For example:

'blog/index/' => 'blog/index',
// /index.php/blog/index/ (with slash)
'site/about' => 'site/about',
// /index.php/site/about (without slash)

Or how they should be configured? One general parameter for the UrlManager component?

[samdark]

Hmm... good question @yiisoft/core-developers what do you think?

[qiangxue]

I think this issue is about automatically performing 301 redirection.

We use suffix (at UrlManager level and/or UrlRule level) to specify whether a URL should end with a slash.

[djagya]

@qiangxue uh, ok, sorry. Yes, it's definitely enough. Then there is no more questions

[samdark]

So should we redirect from unsuffixed URL to suffixed URL? What about redirecting from / to URL w/o suffix?

[qiangxue]

Either direction is possible. There should be an option at manager and rule levels that toggle this behavior.

[dilip-vishwa]

I agree with the above that it affects the SEO.

We should make sure that

• All links should have /. This ensures that the indexing robot will always get to url with 200 status.
• If the user has not used the / in url, then we should redirect it. So, now it only affects User and not the SEO.

Above solution is the most preferred in the SEO based url.
💯

[samdark]

@dilip-vishwa it does not affect SEO for the reasons I've stated above.

[rclai]

You stated reasons?

But anyway, it doesn't matter, like @qiangxue said, just as long as we can get an option manager and rule levels to toggle the behavior.

[samdark]

@rclai confused with another pull-request where I did. Here's the explaination from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ru/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

No duplicate content — no problem. There's no difference between post/25 and post/25/ if only one variant is possible.

Anyway, current plan is good.

[dilip-vishwa]

But if user don't use trailing slash, then they will get 404 error which is not good for the business.

[creocoder]

@dilip-vishwa Need trailing slash — use suffix. Do not need trailing slash — do not use suffix. Need redirection? This not Yii issue, this is for Web server. But:

We should make sure that:

• All links should have /. This ensures that the indexing robot will always get to url with 200 status.
• If the user has not used the / in url, then we should redirect it. So, now it only affects User and not the SEO.

Absolutelly meaningless. Yii should not act like this. This is about configuration.

[dilip-vishwa]

@creocoder OK

[djagya]

Ok, soo what should i do? Will be there redirection or it is for web server?

[samdark]

I am for configurable redirect on framework side.

[creocoder]

@samdark I'm against. This is web server task. For apache this can be achived through mod_rewrite, for other web servers there is another approaches. Such task should be solved at web server level. Redirect rules for SEO purposes is not framework issue.

[samdark]

Thought about it a bit more and @creocoder may be right about it.

[Bhoft]

I can understand the issue with the trailing slash when using slugs or actions.
There the usage of the suffix property is usefull if you want some ".html" added to the urls.
In my issue posted #7670 i had the problem with a custom url rule where i have to add several url rules so that these urls
are working

/projectname => projectcontroller/index
/projectname/ => projectcontroller/index
/projectname/action => projectcontroller/action

/projectname/projectspecifc_controller => projectspecifc_controller/index
/projectname/projectspecifc_controller/ => projectspecifc_controller/index
/projectname/projectspecifc_controller/action => projectspecifc_controller/action

So I have to add only for the trailing slash an additional url rule, where the suffix is set.
But can't it be changed that we could also set an "optional" suffix?

suffix = ".html" 
can then be used for rules with actions and 
optional_suffix = "/" 
can be used for rules only to controllers.

That way all possibilities can be set and on parseRequest there is then also a check if pathInfo has the optional_suffix added.
Or there is some other possibility to set some parts of the url pattern to be optional checked.

This issue is I guess somehow strange because without custom rules you will get the handling that controllername/ would call the index action. But with custom rules you will have to add an additional rule to have this to be able to set something like this (?:[/])?
Which i also mentioned here #7670 (comment)

samdark has written in my issue:
Yes, there's difference and it's intentional.

But then why it is possible to call site/ and get the index action instead of a 404 with no custom url rules.
The Url handling should be the same regardless of additional rules are added or not.
Also in yii1 this how the trailing / was handled there with the same url rules.

[jahangirahmad]

So now we need redirect one of them to other? right?
how can I redirect 301 in yii2(php code) without slash to url that has slash?
ex:

domain.com/item/10/item-slug 

TO

domain.com/item/10/item-slug/ 

[cebe]

see #7670 it has some solutions.