url trailing slash and seo

Question

Which is better for SEO and page rank?

mysite.com/directory/my-page

OR

mysite.com/directory/my-page/

I know the above two URLs are treated as two separate pages by search engines, but I'm stuck on deciding which format to consistently use and which is better.

Thanks,

Ham

Answer 1

Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) prefer trailing slash.

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

Anyway, the most important thing is pick one and stick with it uniformly. Do a 301 redirect for user if needed.

Answer 2

Google does not care about trailing slash. Here is their official answer.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Google treats each URL above separately (and equally) regardless of whether it’s a file or a directory, or it contains a trailing slash or it doesn’t contain a trailing slash.

Matt is just stating his personal preference quoted in the other answer, not the official preference of Google, which is neither.