Q: Half our URLs now have a trailing slash, half don't, and crawl errors are climbing. Bad?
A: Annoying, but easy to tame. Short answer: inconsistent trailing slashes create duplicate URLs and surprise redirect hops, especially when your redirect map and your live site disagree on the format.
Long answer: /page and /page/ are different URLs to a server. If your migration map redirects to /page but the new site canonicalizes to /page/, every old link hits two redirects instead of one. Multiply across thousands of URLs and you get chains, wasted crawl budget, and split signals. This sneaks in because the platform change quietly flips the default slash behavior.
The fix:
— Pick one format (with or without slash) and enforce it site-wide
— Make your redirect targets match that exact format
— Confirm canonicals agree with the chosen format
Next step: decide your slash convention, then audit the redirect map so every target uses it consistently.
Migration Helpdesk
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Q: Half our URLs now have a trailing slash, half don't, and crawl errors are climbing. Bad?
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