Page rank loss with 301 redirects?

[brutondave]

Some research I have done has pointed out that Google (crazily in my opinion) ranks the same page with and without the '/' ending separately. For example www . mysite.com and www . mysite.com/ will be ranked individually. I noticed that I was getting two listings for a number of my pages within Google Analytics and this made me look into things further.

Apparently one solution to this is to put 301 redirects in place from every URL without the '/' to the corresponding page with the '/'. My concern is whether or not the accumulated pagerank will be transferred from the page without '/' to the page with '/'.

Also should these redirects stay in place indefinately?

My other concern is that of duplicate content. If Google ranks the same page separately depending on the '/' then will it penalise the site because of duplicate content.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I'm afriad that putting the redirects in place will undo a great deal of time and hardwork put into SEO.

Thanks,

Dave

 

[MASSEY]

i think the most important one is the non www redirect. I have never bothered with the trailing slash. Just make sure when you buid links you leave the slash off.

 

[brutondave]

The thing is most links on the site point to pages with the trailing slash and these are the ones that have acquired greatest rank. My main question is to whether or not the 301 will confer pagerank from the page linked from or whether it would be lost.

 

[nitro23456]

use .htaccess to redirect to the the page with the slash if it is a concern

 

[MASSEY]

Basically it passes some of the link juice but not all of it.

 

[headshotlondon]

I thought it passes all of the page rank as this is the only and correct way to do redirects according to Google, i.e. through 301. If people were looking page rank then noone would be creating any new pages and just will be updating the old once.

 

[crossdaz]

I thought it passes all of the page rank as this is the only and correct way to do redirects according to Google, i.e. through 301. If people were looking page rank then noone would be creating any new pages and just will be updating the old once.

As far as I know an internal 301 redirect like the one mentioned has no impact on page rank.

A 301 from one domain to another does have an impact because the sites that linked to yoursiteone didn't intend to link to yoursitetwo - so, logically, some page rank is lost. Matt Cutts has confirmed this btw.