Slash vs no slash?

[shawn81]

Why does SeoMoz tell me I have duplicate content issues and show me these two URLs?

mysite.com

mysite.com/

What does the slash matter and why is that considered duplicate content?

[brandonjschwartz]

The slash is minor, but it can create some issues... Search engines can figure out pretty easily which URL you mean but users can't. If users come to the site and decide to link back to you, the link can point to either mysite.com or mysite.com/. The PageRank is essentially split to what really amounts to two separate pages.

You should redirect one to the other. It isn't a huge deal and won't cause too many problems, but why leave something to chance with the algorithm?

If your site runs Drupal, I suggest downloading the Global Redirect plugin for easy across the board decisions about trailing slashes and other duplicate content URL issues.

[JohnW-UK]

Do you know of any plugin suitable for Joomla or Wordpress

[brandonjschwartz]

Hmm... Wordpress has a built in fix. Just add or remove the trailing slash from your permalink structure. For the home page, you can just specify what the home page should be. Joomla, from what I can tell, requires some modification to the htaccess file... I'm not much of a Joomla fan and my Wordpress information could be incomplete, so if anyone has any corrections feel free to chime in.

[AlanMosley]

On the homepage it does not matter, as no redirect is made to the slash, both return a 200 code
but on deeper pages it is a problem as it leads to canonical issues.
I prefer no slash because when people link to you by hand, they rarely add the slash on the end.

Wordpress makes a mess of this, i have to say, i dont use wordpress so i dont know if its wordp[ress of a plugin, but almost all wordpress sites have un-neecessary redirects. That is internal links that go thought a 301 to get to the internal link, each 301 is a link juice leak, so why would you do this when the link is internal. Wordpress sites often use a 301 redirect to send you to a url with a slash, when the link should point to the slash or none slash, and there for not leak ling juice.

The first think i do when i build a site, is setup my redirects, to ensure a canonical domain, none slash( or slash one of the other), and make sure all urls are lowercase. These things are a nightmare to fix later.