To 301 or not to 301?

[seorocket]

I have a client that is having a new site built. Their old site (WP) does not use the trailing / at the end of urls. The new site is using most of the same url names but IS using the /. For instance, the old site would be www.example.com/products and the new site, also WP, will be www.example.com/products/.

WordPress will resolve either way, but my question is whether or not to go in and redirect each matching non / page to the new url that has the /.

I don't want to leave any link juice on the table but if I can keep the juice without doing a few hundred 301s that certainly wouldn't suck.

Any thoughts?

Sleepless in KVegas

[WilliamKammer]

Sorry, Google treats them as different URLs: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Play it safe and redirect. You probably don't need to do hundreds of individual redirects though. Try using Regex in the .htaccess file to solve your issue. Might end up being 2 lines of code in a rewrite rule.

You could also implement rel=canonical tags as an alternative.

[seorocket]

We discussed using the canonical tag but wasn't sure it would be quite as good as using a 301. We will probably go with HT Access method.

Thanks for the quick response, BTW!

Cheers.

Tom V