To slash or not to slash - Going from no trailing slashes to trailing slashes sitewide

[AndyMacLean]

A friend has a large site and his dev team are about to launch with the sitewide addition of trailing slashes on urls, which are not on the original site. Both versions of the url work e.g. /example and /example/ and the dev team is reluctant to change back as it will take 3 days (developers hey?)

My SEO mind tells me this is a bad thing. Yes you could:

• 301 from non slash to slash but sitewide I don't like the idea because of the small loss in link juice x lots of pages.

• You could canonical from non slash to slash but the non slash is the original and canonicals are supposed to point to the original version of the content.

1. Any thoughts appreciated

2. Couldn't the devs use the htaccess file to force the / version to the non / version?

[justin-brock]

That seems like too much work. I would do this instead:

1. Add rel=canonical on the non-/ version
2. Use htaccess to force the non-/ version
3. And update the sitemaps