url trailing slash and seo

Question

Hi,

Which is better for SEO and page rank?

mysite.com/directory/my-page

OR

mysite.com/directory/my-page/

I know the above two URLs are treated as two separate pages by search engines, but I'm stuck on deciding which format to consistently use and which is better.

Thanks,

Ham

Answer 1

Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) prefer trailing slash.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Anyway, the most important thing is pick one and stick with it uniformly. Do a 301 redirect for user if needed.

Answer 2

both should be equal regarding SEO (as long as you keep consistency) but tend to have different meanings for the user :

mysite.com/directory/my-page would be the URL to a page while : mysite.com/directory/my-page/ would be the URL to the index of a directory.

these being only habits since you can rewrite any URL you want the way you want...

Answer 3

.htaccess redirecting to trailing slash urls

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [L,R=301]