Unnecessary 301s?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

hi mozzers,

I'm doing an audit on a website. I detected over 60 301s of this nature: www.example.com/help 301d to www.example.com/help/.

I believe these are completely useless and increase page load time. Am I right? should i kill those 301s?

Thanks

[Ray-pp]

It looks like the 301s were meant to force a trailing slash at the end of the URL. This would be done to prevent duplicate URLs. However, rather than add each URL manually, you could replace it with a regex

Example:

<code>RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1$2/ [L,R=301]</code> 

[Joe.Robison]

I second what Ray says, having the rule in your .htaccess file is always a good practice. Especially to prevent the annoyance of seeing both versions in your Google Analytics.

This question was answered in another Moz Q&A, and although it's from 2012 the responses are still good.