Is it better to have trailing slash or no trailing slash in URLs and what if both variations work?

[urkeman]

Hi I have a situation on a website where the links are structured like this http://website.com/myurl/ so anywhere you click you will land on a page with a trailing slash but if i remove the trailing slash like this http://website.com/myurl the page is still going to open the same content.

1. so it works with and without the trailing slash. is this considered as duplicate content by google? and if so what is the best way to go? should i redirect al the non trailing slash urls to trailing slash or the opposite?

2. if i redirect am i going to loose some link juice from existing external links which mainly already point to urls without th trailing slash.

3. i've noticed that the sitemap.xml contains links without the trailing slash .. should it contain the urls with the trailing slash?

Also there's many external links pointing to this site but withouth the trailng slash like this http://website.com/myurl

[SajeetNair]

Hi,

I would suggest that you verify whether 301 redirects are even a possibility. For example, if the website is hosted on IIS server, then the 301 redirect rule might result into a redirect loop. In such a scenario, I would suggest you place self canonical tag on the page. For example on the page domainA.com/page 1, we will have the following tag in the head section of the page -

For the PDF files, place the canonical tag in the header response.

On the links front - You will not be losing a lot

Regards,
Sajeet

[MoosaHemani]

I would personally suggest you not to go for 301 as it will increase the page load time of the website which direct affects the rankings in search engines. I would rather prefer to choose the preferred version and use canonicals on every page of the website. This way Google will have an idea about what URL is the preferred and crawl the stuff accordingly.

Hope this helps!

[webmethod]

The problem you're describing is almost exactly the reason why canonical URL functionality exists. Just pick your canonical (with or without slash - it doesn't matter) and make sure you roll it out consistently across your website and sitemap.

Regards,

George