Old content with trailing `/` - What should be my new approach?

[KaustubhKatdare]

Dear team Moz,

I'm investigating SEO issues for the site that dropped rankings over a period of 4-6 months;  after conversion from old platform (xenForo) to new custom developed platform.

The old version of the site was a simple xenForo based forum; with threads having standard url structure as like www.domain.com/threads/thread-title.{thread_id}/. Notice the trailing slash.

We chose to keep the URLs intact during conversion to new platform; however the site still lost rankings. I'm sure there could be multiple reasons for it - but I wish to know if I should adjust the URLs -

1. By 301 redirecting all the URLs with trailing / to the URLs without /.

2. Leave the URLs as they were.

I must also mention that the new site has several new sections; and the old forum is just one part of it. The rest of the site follows URLs without trailing / - as it's the recommended URL structure by Google.

I'd really appreciate your suggestions on this.

[Optimal_Strategies]

From what I know, most platforms have trailing removing plugin or module, so it's worth trying this first. If you won't manage to do that way, do 301 redirects but this might cause issue if "/" url's will still be created. Hope that helps.

[KaustubhKatdare]

Thank you for your response @Optimal_Strategies. Of course, the right way to get rid of all the trailing slashes throughout the site is to enforce the rule in NGINX configuration.

However, the real question we have is the right strategy -

1. Whether we should leave existing content on the site with trailing "/" and continue building rest of the site with URLs without trailing slashes.

OR

2. Enforce non-trailing slashes site-wide and implement a 301 redirect to all the OLD urls to new urls.