WordPress users - sharpen your URLs with Google!

First of all you must enable the permalinks, but that you probably already have done.

Now to the point. Did you know that these are all different URLs for the same blog post?

http://www.myblog.com/my-blog-post
http://www.myblog.com/my-blog-post/
http://myblog.com/my-blog-post
http://myblog.com/my-blog-post/

Google sees this as 4 different URLs and 4 different pages when in fact it is only one. One of them will rank higher in Google than the rest. This is called canonicalization problem and is discussed by a Google staff here.

Let’s say you get a nice link to http://www.myblog.com/my-blog-post but in fact it is http://www.myblog.com/my-blog-post/ that ranks higher. This link is useless in terms of ranking!

The solution to get all 4 versions made into only one and to have all weight/power transferred to that one

Add the following lines in the .htaccess file before the WordPress permalinks lines:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^myblog\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myblog.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

That will make all posts go to this version: http://www.myblog.com/my-blog-post/

Just replace myblog before you add it and don’t forget to still include the WordPress permalinks section in the .htaccess file.

Let me know any feedback, ideas, comments etc.