301 help, whats the best way

[Will_Craig]

Hi all

right now i have 301 redirects setup in my htaccess file

i recently redesigned our site so i have been redirecting all the old urls to the new ones.

I saw a post about having all your urls the same format, so i updated my htaccess file to redirect all urls from http://www.mysite.com/food to http://www.mysite.com/food/ (added a forward slash).

Now on my latest seo crawl i see all my site urls, redirecting to the forward slash url.

am i doing this right,

thanks

will

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Will,

Looks like you've got it right.

Without the 301 redirect you'd have two versions of the same page (one with the trailing slash, and one without), so 301 redirecting all the URLs to the version with the trailing slash is definitely the best way to go.

If your crawl report shows the redirects are active you should be good to go.

[glennfriesen]

Sounds like you're doing it right!

You want your URLs to end in a trailing slash, and for the URLs that don't, you want a training slash added. If that's what's showing up in your reports and in your spot checks, you're doing great!

You may want to write a code that does this automatically -- e.g. that adds a trailing slash to any URL that doesn't have one, if that url doesn't inclue a filetype (to exclude bad things like /image.png becoming /image.png/)

Note: If you're on Wordpress, you might try a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/ to catch any bad urls that might rear their heads later -- it or something like it (if you're not on WordPress) would also likely take care of the redirection issue you're having altogether.