frankiez asked
Member (0 upvotes)

Wordpress Plugin created two permalinks - could this lead to ranking issues?

Hello, all

So we use an agency to help out on some larger projects which I do not have time for.

We just launched our website and we are in somewhat of a rankings slump. Nothing too terrible, but noticeable drop in traffic and rankings.

As I was investigating this, I noticed that for some reason right after the website launch we were ranking for two different pages for the same page. One had / at the end, and the other did not.

Example: www.homepage.com/myfirstpage and www.homepage.com/myfirstpage/

Here is a screen shot of our GSC below. The old one fell off over the weekend, and since then, some rankings are slowly starting to recover.

https://imgur.com/YvPdWkN

Just wondering, could this have caused the rankings and traffic slump -or could it be something else?

I've never experienced something like this before, so I'd like to rule this out as soon as possible before moving on to other potential problem areas.

Thanks,

#rankings#wordpress#newwebsite

Chedders
Moderator (243 upvotes)

You will have internal links pointing to both urls somewhere. I would grab a copy of screaming frog and crawl your site and see if you can see where the links are. Once found then fix the issues. Finding them is normally the hardest part.

But would it affect your ranking? possibly as you have 2 pages containing exactly the same information. So you are in competition with yourself.

Good advice?

Comments 0

metapilot
Member (0 upvotes)

Frankiez,

I think you will find that that will sort itself out with time. Here's how google sees the trailing slash issue:

The rest of the article is pretty informative too and gives some correction options:

https://www.danielmorell.com/guides/htaccess-seo/redirects/https-www-and-trailing-slash

Good advice?

Comments 0

Wordpress Plugin created two permalinks - could this lead to ranking issues?

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