Google thinks my home page IS a trailing slash

Question

I am desperate to know why Google webmaster tools AND analytics are registering my home page as a trailing slash?!

There are no crawl errors, 401s, search issues, nothing wrong otherwise.

My home page is written with a trailing slash and if a visitor does not include the slash, my site will automatically fetch the / and send them to http://about/

I think maybe this is why Google now thinks that / is my home page.

I have a wordpress blog that someone installed but it's my own domain. Has this ever happened to anyone in the history of the internet before?

Answer 1

If you mean Google is showing your site as

http://example.com/

instead of

http://example.com/index.htm

then this is to do with the way webservers work. The server is typically configured to answer a request for the first URL with a default document (which may well be index.htm, depending on your setup).

Additionally, if your site is redirecting visitors to different page with Javascript, you should be aware that Google's search bots typically cannot interpret Javascript, and will not be redirected like a visitor with a graphical browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Answer 2

As Colin mentioned, this depends on the settings in your webserver and your .htaccess rules. Wordpress typically rewrites URLs (for clean URLs) and it could be misconfiguration there.