In a recent post on Google Webmaster’s blog, Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead has explained in depth about Slash or no Slash, where webmasters have doubts if putting a slash at the end of the URL affects their site.
According to the post, it is always best to have one URL structure, whichever you follow. Still, if the URL returns the same content, you should not worry about duplicate content issues as The Indexing process can handle this case for webmasters.
If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:
- Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
- Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s legitimate and a-okay. 🙂
- Rest assured that for your root URL, http://example.com is equivalent tohttp://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.
So far as my understanding goes, whatever URL structure you follow, the content should not change because of one trailing slash. It’s always good if you can rectify it, but if you can, it’s still ok.
