@infinitnet is there any evidence you can link us to about this? I am genially curious. It sounds really dumb if they behave that way. I would think google and co are smarter than this.

@kof A huge part of Google's communication is tailored for PR, ie. they tend to claim that Google is smart enough to figure out X or Y when the reality often looks different. I don't have a case study on this particular issue because 95% of websites I work with use WordPress which redirects by default.

But I'm happy to reproduce this issue for the /blog section of your site so you can see it for yourself. On your docs subdomain you already seem to redirect from non trailing slash to trailing slash but your /blog section doesn't and it also doesn't have canonical tags. If you're okay with this, just let me know and I'll run an experiment where you'll see "Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical" errors pop up in Google Search Console in a few days as well as the trailing slash variations of your blog posts being indexed in Google Search and they should get some impressions as well.

If you have couple dozen of pages this is a non-issue at all, if you have a giant site and you are hitting the limits of crowling budget - then yes, it becomes a problem.

Yes, but a lot of sites have more than a few dozen pages - especially if you do programmatic SEO for example which Webstudio is useful for. And even with a few dozen you might not actually run into crawl budget limitations where Googlebot would stop crawling all pages, but it's still a site-wide quality signal. If 50% of the URLs are duplicates, it affects the overall site quality scores negatively. Google has had issues with scale/resources for years already and AI content has only made this worse, meaning that domains with a lot of "useless" pages lose crawl priority and often also rankings over time (the more pages the worse this gets of course).

Their recent "helpful content updates" play into this as well where sites with a lot of "unhelpful" pages rank worse. This is mostly related to user signals and how visitors interact with the sites/pages, but if 50% are duplicates that are just "there" without getting visitors, it plays into that part of the algorithm as well.

Ref: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update

The signal is also weighted; sites with lots of unhelpful content may notice a stronger effect. In any case, for the best success, be sure you've removed unhelpful content [...]

Ensure SEO tools don't complain about trailing slash #4327

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