Hi,

I created a Search & Filter Form and set the display results method to “Post Type Archive”. After I saw in Google Analytics, that this site was getting hits with a trailing slash and without I started looking into what might cause this undesired behaviour. The desired behaviour would be to always remove trailing slashes. This is the case on each and every site on the web property tested this on. Those sites include other archive pages but without a search form, pages, posts and custom posts etc.. When I turned off the Search & Filter Plugin this behaviour disappeared.

Is there a setting that allows me to stop this behaviour or what other way is there to deal with this? Is this actually intended behaviour?

The two primary reasons this is bad are:

• It’s bad for SEO. The primary rule for URLs is that they must be unique. Making the same page reachable by two URLs (and yes, the trailing slash does matter) makes it look like we are offering two identical pages to Google. This creates uncertainty as well as internal duplicate content and therefore hurts SEO.
• It messes with Google Analytics. A page that should look like one is split into two and makes it unnecessarily more difficult to track performance.