301 redirect url without / to end with /

Question

im trying to correct some URL's that dont have the / at the end,

for example, expressionengine created the url without the / however, im trying to redirect whereas all my URls are consisten with the / at the end.

problem is I already have ranking on the non / urls and now showing up duplicate content with urls listing the / at the end.

what kind or redirect 301 should I do.

ive tried this with no luck.

redirect 301 /products/item http://www./products/item/

it wont work in my .htaccess file.

any sugestions

Answer 1

A 301 (permanent redirect) is the best option and if you want to do it across the board on your site then try this in your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/|#(.*))$
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

This will append the forward slash onto directories but not filenames and set it as a 301.

You can also use rel="canonical" on existing links which works similarly to a 301 in terms of search engine indexing.