When I access http://example.com in a web browser, the browser adds a slash to the end of the URL and loads the page.The part that scares me is that duplicate content exists when one uses the command-line tool CURL to access the same domain with and without the slash. This means http://example.com/ doesn't redirect to http://example.com or vice-versa, and neither indicate its canonical. (both attempts return the exact same result).Since practically every website has this issue including this one and mine, Does this mean that I shouldn't care about this duplicate content issue or is there something that can be done about this?
Why does http://example.com equal http://example.com/?
url;duplicate content;url rewriting;canonical url
There's nothing to worry about here, since http://example.com and http://example.com/ are the same URL. The useragent has to include a path in the HTTP request (as per RFC 2616), so what it sends to the server will be GET / in either case.If you add the verbose flag to CURL this is quite easy to verify:$ curl -v http://example.com* Rebuilt URL to: http://example.com/* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache*   Trying xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...* Connected to example.com (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) port 80 (#0)> GET / HTTP/1.1> User-Agent: curl/7.38.0> Host: example.com> Accept: */*> < HTTP/1.1 200 OK< Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 01:27:48 GMT* Server Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) is not blacklisted< Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)< Vary: Accept-Encoding< Transfer-Encoding: chunked< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8< [Response]