Trailing Slashes, Permalinks, Backlinks and SEO

If you have a (wordpress) blog, you might want to check your permalinks settings.

To my astonishment i found out that not EACH of my sites has/had the same (and right) permalink setting.

Some had /%postname%/ <- note trailing slash

and some others had /%postname% <- without trailing slash

I got very confused since i cross-checked several LINKS in articles of mine, and i saw that the link structure in the articles often did NOT match the permalink setting.

For example i am linking to a post on my site with the slash appended in the hyperlink, while the actual permalink setting in wordpress didnt have a slash. (You can also see this in the sitemap)

NOW..the problem is that opinions regarding this vary, i can list some SEO people telling you it doesnt matter at all - and other people say it matters. Lets assume the worst case scenario....i would have posts which all have a trailing slash in their URL but link to them in the "wrong" way. (Of course the same thing can apply vice versa, depending what your permalink setting is)

What i am saying...if you're picky and assuming this is an issue....look at your permalinks settings and then look at your links you make in your link building. Because you should be consistent in how you link to your articles - not a bunch of links with slash, and then another bunch without.

Not really easy if someone has 100s of sites and discovers that the permalinks settings is not necessarily the same in each one...


To make the issue even more confusing, there are also various opinions what the "best" permalink settings are. Some say /%postname%/ WITH slash. (Matt Cutts uses it on his blog!) - but many tell you that WITHOUT trailing slash is better.Then there is a bunch who say that neither of them is optimal.