How to handle crawl diagnostic errors for the same url. /products & /products/

[tjsherrill]

I have copied on of the errors out of the crawl diagnostics report.  Both /products and /products/ are returning an error, and both have pretty good domain authority so I feel like its hurting my site that these show up this way.  Both urls create the same page, should I just setup a 301 on the /products with no slash or will that cause more harm... I am using the MODx cms system and that could have something to do with it.

|

Products | Datalight

http://www.datalight.com/products	1	37	5

Products | Datalight

http://www.datalight.com/products/ | 1 | 30 | 1 |

[Keszi]

Hey TJ,

For your example there would be an easy solution:

• 301 redirect (it will take up a lot of time but, then you will be redirecting both users and search engines to one of the version)
• Canonical (it will not redirect the user, instead it will tell Search Engines that the page that they are looking for is the one specified in the canonical link)

A more visual explanation of this issue can be found on a great post of Dr. Pete. Check it out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

I hope that helped,

Istvan