Trailing Slash: Lost in Redirection?

[kwoolf]

Question here, but first the lead in. As you all know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site using htaccess to redirect all non-ww to www and redirect all URLs to have a trailing slash. FYI, the preferred domain is selected in WMT and canonical URLs appear in the head section of all pages.

So now what happens when sites that link to mine don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site own to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get lost in redirection?

I can't think of anything more I can do to the URLs to reduce duplicate content and juice dilution. Thoughts?

Kevin

[sesertin]

I think this is evertything you can do. Do 301 or implement canonicals from the non slash versions of the urls to your preferred slash versions. There will be only a handful I think who will type in your urls manually rather them copying and pasting them when they want to link to it. You can do nothing with the rest: as you said: ask them to correct or bear that 10%loss of link juice.

[AlanMosley]

from www.site.com to wwwsite.com/ you wont lose anything, it ios not a 301, it happens by itself.

but /page to /page/ you will lose a bit.

I always suggest non slash as people are much more likly to leave a slash off then add one on when creating a link.

Make sure that whatt ever you decide that you keep to in your internal linking, you have no control over what others do.

[RyanKent]

Hi Kevin,

I responded to this question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/trailing-slashes-in-url-use-canonical-url-or-301-redirect#post-53208

In short, you have taken all the proper action. You have done everything possible to ensure users properly link to your site by using a consistent URL format. You have also properly redirected those users who do not use the proper format, which is much better then many sites which simply generate a 404 error.

If you set up your site properly from day 1, the result should be over 90% of the links to your site are valid, and a small percentage require a single redirect. It's the best result you can hope for. You cannot achieve 100% efficiency as links from other sites are outside your control.

[kwoolf]

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info.

On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!