Trailing-slash and case variants split your crawl in two

Trailing-slash and case variants split your crawl in two

Across 196 domains, 27% served /page and /page/ (and mixed-case URLs) as separate 200s. Crawl and signals split across identical content.

— Sites with slash/case dupes: 27.0% ▓▓▓░░░░░░░
— Median duplicate URL pairs: 3,400
— Crawl wasted on dupes: 19.0% of requests
— Signal dilution vs. single URL: ↓ ~50% per variant

The error: the server normalizes nothing, so every variant is crawled, indexed, and competes with itself.

Fix: pick one form, 301 all variants to it at the edge, enforce lowercase, and keep internal links consistent. Self-canonical the winner. Cohort that normalized recovered 19% of crawl budget and consolidated split rankings (↑ 8% average position lift on affected URLs).

So what: one piece of content deserves exactly one URL.