Trailing Slashes on URLs

[NickOrbital]

Hi everyone

I have a question on trailing slashes in URL.

The crux of it is this:

is having both: example.com/subdirectory/ and: example.com/subdirectory on all of your subdirectories considered duplicate content by Google - or in some other way really bad?

We have done a heck a lot of research into this, and it would seem...no one knows for sure (it is easy to get lost in a sea of Webmaster tool forums from 2012). Google itself has both URLs for it's subdirectories (try https://www.google.co.uk/maps and https://www.google.co.uk/maps/) as does Moz; and yet there are some rumblings on the internet of people who think you must put a 'redirect' (although not really a redirect as it isn't a 301) in your htaccess file to one or the other (so for example.com/subdirectory/ would 'forward' to example.com/subdirectory); and this is what bbc.co.uk do.

We tried putting this htaccess 'forward' in as an experiment, but I noticed our site then stopped being fully crawled by Google bot, so we reversed it.

Can any one shed any light?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there.

There is the rule: do not show google duplicate content. So, having both, with and without the trailing slashes is an issue. 
If you dont want or think is not necessary a redirect... you can set a canonical.  As you said, moz doesnt have a redirect, instead has a canonical.

Check it out: view-source:https://moz.com/community/q/

Hope it helps.
GR.