Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?

[upick-162391]

I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls.

EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1

Already got a redirect for non-www to www already.

Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?

[RyanKent]

You are absolutely correct Kevin. By deciding to use a specific URL format on your site and consistently using the same format in all internal links you have done everything in your control. The overwhelming majority of the external links to your site will be correct.

Additionally, the links which use the wrong format will then be 301'd to their correct format rather then offering a 404 error. Only a very small percentage of links should require redirection and those that do will get it.

[kwoolf]

Hey Ryan,

Question here, but first the lead in. As you know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site to redirect all non-ww to www and all URLs to include a trailing slash. So now what happens to ranking when sites that link to my site don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site owner to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get Lost in Redirection?

Kevin

[upick-162391]

Well never hurts to do both, thanks will look into runing both cononical and 301's

[RyanKent]

That's up to you, but I prefer to use both. The 301 redirect, once set up, should always work. At times a site experiences an issue whereby a .htaccess file is deleted, overwritten or modified accidentally. When that happens the issue may not be immediately discovered. Lots of headaches can be caused this way.

The canonical tag helps minimize the damage in this case, and also helps with the natural variations websites have such as a "print" version of a page.

[upick-162391]

Thanks Ryan, I suppose I'll leave out the Conanical tags

[RyanKent]

In my experience a 301 redirect is always the superior course of action. One reason is with a 301 redirect, you will ensure those who create links to your site will use the proper URL format. This way, your links go directly to the proper page without losing any link juice to a redirect.

Canonical tags are a great backup in case something goes wrong, but 301 redirects are always preferable.