Duplicate Homepage issue

[LucasF]

SEOMOZ says my site has two homepages:

www.mysite.com

www.mysite.com/

When you go to "www.mysite.com/" the URL changes to "www.mysite.com"

Why is this happening and what can I do about it?

[rmontanez]

Do you have a 301 redirect?  Can you provide a link to your site?

[bronxpad]

Doing a 301 redirect with htaccess is the best way but you can also always use the canonical command that you will place in the head of your html code.

Here is a good site that will tell you everything you need to know about 301 redirects and canonical

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Lucas,

If the URL is automatically changing to the non-trailing slash version it sounds like there is already a redirect in place. This is good practice for SEO.

Multiple versions of a page (e.g. www,mystite.com, mysite.com, www.mystite.com/, mysite.com/) can split ranking power and lead to lower rankings overall. A 301 redirect transfers the majority of the "link juice" to the page that it is redirecting to.

This post on the official Google blog is a great starting point to learn more about trailing slashes and their implications for SEO: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html