setting up 301's from mysite.com to mysite.com/

would that be wise? I was doing some searching and, even though Im careful to always use the trailing /, many people that visit my site and refer people don't type the /

Would it help serps to 301 to the the / , or is that something thats done automatically?

 

Place this in your .htaccess, it will append the "/" and also the "www" to your URL.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

 

What is the benefit of this?

 

this pushes all backlinks to a standardized URL formation.

 

Same question - what's the benefit of THAT? (Not being argumentative, just asking)

 

same answer. all backlinks and PR weight will be pushed to standardized URLs even if they link to you site wrong.

 

do i need the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> statements?

I'm already using the rewrite engine for sef urls

 

it will do without, just good programming style to do so

 

According to the specs, a url like:

http://www.domain.com is exactly the same as http://www.domain.com/

and both wil result in the same http fetch request,

GET / HTTP/1.x

Code (markup):

(even if there was no trailing slash in the url)

 

that is true, I prefer to have everything standardized. but that is just me.

 

yes they point to the same place, but I see alot of search engine results with 2 listings to the same place, only difference is the trailing / ... and they have different pageranks. Thanks for the code ServerUnion

 

Thanks ServerUnion. That code worked perfectly.

 

I use the / code on a php directory site I have because / and no-slash are not considered the same thing due to rewriting.

So it helps... else you end up with all kinds of wacky urls.