URL Trailing Slash for SEO Purposes

I noticed when I enter...

http://domain.com/product
and
http://domain.com/product/

they both are treated as a separate page and don't redirect. This is bad SEO practice and is considered duplicate content which Google doesn't like.

For instance on http://www.mattcutts.com/ if you enter either of these

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

they all redirect to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

By default Nop gives each of these variations its own page which is seen by search engines as duplicate content.

I understand Nop 3.20 has a fix for the www vs non-www issue, but is there any kind of fix for the trailing slash / vs non-trailing slash at the end of the URLs?

you can do this with a simple IIS Rewrite rule.

<rewrite>
  <rules>
  
    <!--To always remove trailing slash from the URL-->
    <rule name="Remove trailing slash" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url="(.*)/$" />
      <conditions>
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
      </conditions>
      <action type="Redirect" redirectType="Permanent" url="{R:1}" />
    </rule>
    
  </rules>
</rewrite>

marcwagener wrote:

Thanks for the quick response Marc! Do you know of an IIS Rewrite Rule that will keep the trailing slash?

this rule can be added in IIS via a template, you have the option to append or to remove trailing slash

I'm removing on my site...

it doesn't affect SEO. Check this video by Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTrdP7lJ2HU