Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash.

[Profero]

Our site is recieving traffic for both .com/page and .com/page/ with the trailing slash. Should we rewrite to just the trailing slash or without because of duplicates. The other question is, if we do a rewrite, google has indexed some pages with the slash and some without - i am assuming we will lose rank for one of them once we do the rewrite, correct?

[AlanMosley]

This can be a big problem, I asume that your site 301 redirect to one or the other. All your internal links should point to the url that it redirect to. Every link leaks link juice, if you have a 301 it leaks twice. site wide this can mean a lot of link juice going up in smoke. there is not much you can do about the external links you already have, but if you fix the problem you can eliminate it in the future.
I have a tutorial on how to create a 301 to fix this for Windows servers
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-issues-involving-the-trailing-slash

If you want too provide your url, either here or private message, i can loook into this probllem for you.

I should also mention that SE's see the 2 urls with and without as 2 different pages and your rank is split

[Profero]

Hi Alan,

First of all thanks for the quick resposne.

At the moment there is no redirect -  basically, both pages exist and as you said we have duplicate content and losing link juice. But because google has indexed some pages with slash and some without, i wasn't sure if we should set up a rewrite rule for all slashes to remove the slash OR just do a redirect for the individual pages.

E.g.

we have

example.com/page  - not indexed

example.com/page/ - indexed

example.com/page2 - indexed

example.com/page2/ - not indexed

so im not 100% sure if i should individually set up redirects, or just rewrite to get rid of all slashes and lose indexing from google on the slashed versions.

Does that make sense?

Cheers mate,

[AlanMosley]

No thats not a problem, SE will follow what you do, its if you have external links pointing to those pages is the proble, they will be 301 redirected and you will lose a little link juice. buyt if you dont fix it, you will keep getting teh problem.

If you have 2 external links pointing to url/ and url, then SE see that as 2 different pages each with one link. If you 301 it, they will see it as 1 page with 2 links, one a 301 redirect that loses a little LJ. My asumpution is that a 301 leaks 15%, others say a bit less, i wint go into who is right and wrong, we really dont know, but it is confiremmd that it does leak. so haveing 2 pages each with 1 links is not as good as having 1 page with 1.85 links. It would be better if you had both links pointing to the same verion of the page of cause.
Get that fixed pronto, then make sure all your internal links point to the correct version.
Do it site wide, as i said the search engines will ajust next crawl or 2.

[Profero]

Thanks mate! All i wanted to know.