Redirecting duplicate pages

[k9byron]

For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this

www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/

or

http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/

now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!

[Matt-Williamson]

Redirect the URLs to one version, for a start it will make your site more crawler friendly for search engines so they don't waste time crawling each version of the page fully and also as you mention it will eliminate duplicate content.

Why make Google do extra work? - your site architecture needs to be as clear as possible, so that Google can crawl it efficiently and not have to deal with duplicates..

This link says it all - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Here is a recent Q&A from some of the others in the community backing up the fact that you should redirect one version of the URL to eliminate duplicate content

- http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-issue-with-trailing

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi there, URLs with a trailing slash or without a trailing slash..this has been very much discussed and debated in the SEO circles for quite a long time. The fact is you can go with either of these but be consistent with what you go with through out your website. Personally, I would prefer all the URLs ending with a folder name go with a trailing slash and all the URLs that end with file names should end with proper file extension. And for me if anything ends without a trailing slash, it would be a file and not a folder (don't you think I am biased towards static websites?). This issue is very common with dynamic websites and to conclude, as your SEO guy rightly mentioned, there is absolutely nothing to worry about and Google will take care of this issue (rather a common practice or should I call it a mistake?) pretty well. Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur.

[ChrisCountey]

I agree 100% with Matt. I would also recommend checking your internal links to ensure that they are all following the same format with or without the /.