Handling The Trailing Slash in Your urls

It has long been a topic of concern as to what effect having a trailing slash on urls (i.e. http://www.tengoldenrules.com vs. http://www.tengoldenrules.com/) has on search engine optimization. Although it is possible to have different content on both the url with a trailing slash and the same url without a trailing slash, this can be very confusing to users. Therefore, from a user perspective, it is not recommended to have pages with different content in which the only difference in url of those pages is including a trailing slash.

Now lets look at this from a search engine perspective. Having the same content on a trailing slash and a non-trailing slash version of a url can become a duplicate content issue. Search engines can see this as two separate pages, flagging one of the pages as duplicate content. This can, however be remedied fairly simply.

According to Google's Webmaster Central Blog, the best remedy to having duplicate content on trailing slash and non-trailing slash urls is to first choose a preferred version. Let's say we prefer the trailing slash version. Next, you will want to make sure that all links within your website and sitemap point to the preferred version of the urls (in this example it will be the version with the trailing slash). Finally, perform a 301 redirect from the non-trailing slash urls to those urls with a trailing slash.

Don't Use Auto Content Generation Software

It's not always easy to think of new, original content for your website, and sometimes webmasters are tempted to cut corners by investing in auto content generation software. But before you invest in these tools to generate content, you need to consider:

• Source of the Content - if you're not writing it, then the content needs to come from somewhere. Most of these tools are using RSS feeds to pull in that information or scraping content from other websites, putting you at risk of creating duplicate content that violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
• Google Doesn't Index RSS Feeds - in December 2007, their blog announced that Google would no longer be indexing RSS feeds because of duplicate content issues. So if the software is using RSS feeds to get the content then those pages created by the software probably won't be indexed.
• Copyright - Most companies copyright their information. If you're using a tool to scrap content from other websites, you might be violating copyright laws.

Don't invest in auto content generation software, invest in writing original content. Yes, it takes more time and effort, but it's more likely to be indexed, you're not breaking the law, and creates a better user experience.