Q: A trailing-slash inconsistency was quietly halving our crawl — is that a real thing?

Q: A trailing-slash inconsistency was quietly halving our crawl — is that a real thing?

Yes, and it's sneakier than it sounds.

Short answer: pick one format, 301 the other, done.

Long answer: a SaaS blog served both /guide and /guide/ with 200 status — Google treated them as two URLs. The sitemap listed slash versions, internal links used no-slash. Result: ~5,200 URLs reported, but only ~2,600 "real" pages. Crawl budget was wasted re-checking duplicates, and canonical tags were inconsistent.

We standardized on no trailing slash, 301-ed all slash versions, and rewrote internal links to match. GSC's "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" bucket dropped from 2,400 to 38 in three weeks. Indexed pages stabilized and crawl frequency on real content roughly doubled.

Next step: in GSC's Pages report, look for two near-identical URLs differing only by a slash — that's your signal.