Blog and Blog/ - How to Make Search Engines See them as One

Wordpress blog

[alika]

I am using WordPress 2.9.2 for my blog with Platinum SEO plugin. Our URL structure for the blog is www.URL.com/blog/year/month/blog-post-title/

What bothers me is that Google Webmaster Tool shows our blog's URL www.URL.com/blog to be different from the URL with a slash www.URL.com/blog/ . I have moved this blog from Blogger where the URL was www.URL.com/blog and now that it is in Wordpress the URL is showing as www.URL.com/blog/

How can I make Google and the other search engines see that blog is the same as blog/ ? Is this a canonical problem?

How can I fix this? Is this something I can configure within Wordpress, or any of the plugins?

Thanks

[ergophobe]

Yeah, it's a canonical problem.

The first question - what form do the links use. In other words, how is the WP navigation building your links? Presumably, it's adding the slash.

So first you need to go to
http://[your domain]/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

And add/remove the slash from your permalink path as needed.

Then, for incoming links, you need to set up your .htaccess or httpd.conf to send a 301 and redirect to/from the version with the trailing slash, depending on what you need.

Does that make sense?

[alika]

I put in the trailing slash in the permalink path

However, can you put in non techy terms the instructions for setting up the htaccess file? This way I can redirect the nontrailing slash to the trailing slash.

Thanks ergophobe! You've been such a great help ... as always

[ergophobe]

Nobody can explain this stuff like Jim Morgan....

[webmasterworld.com...]

good luck

[alika]

Thanks ergophone ... really helpful