Unique Situation for trailing / and no /

Should I redirect to / or no /?

[StaceyJ]

Not sure if this is the right place for this, so please move if it's not.

I have a perl program that generates categories and sub-categories.

The script for example
www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi
can be either a page OR a directory with pages under it - for example
www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi/blue-widgets
and this can have product pages under it like
www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi/blue-widgets/round-blue-widget

G has the widgets.cgi listed both ways, with and without a trailing /
www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi
AND
www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi/

Being that the .cgi can be either a page on it's own OR a directory, and I know a page should not have a trailing / and a directory should, how would be the best way to handle this to eliminate duplicate content issues?

Oh, I do plan to clean up the URL's after the holidays, but for now I just need to take care of this without doing damage to established listings.

[edited by: StaceyJ at 4:22 pm (utc) on Oct. 24, 2007]

[tedster]

I'm not sure there is any elegant way to do this - seems like almost any attempt would generate a huge .htaccess file, and robots.txt won't work. I wouldn't touch it until after the holidays.

I might be missing the point, though. Is the problem only with Google indexing the "bare" url widgets.cgi? Is that an important url, just on its own with no further file path or parameters?

[StaceyJ]

I might be missing the point, though. Is the problem only with Google indexing the "bare" url widgets.cgi? Is that an important url, just on its own with no further file path or parameters?

Well, yeah, it's a main category page which also creates sub-categories under it (when they exist).

I guess maybe the example (below) I gave wasn't the best:

www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/widgets.cgi/blue-widgets/round-blue-widget

The entire shop sells widgets, so maybe below is a better representation:

www.example.com/cgi-bin/shope/blue-widgets.cgi/round-blue-widgets/round-blue-widget-product1

Where blue-widgets.cgi is a product thumbnail page listing all blue widgets, but after that it's also a directory for a sub-category page of all the round blue widgets. Also

/round-blue-widgets/

can be a thumbnail product page or a directory for the final product pages such as

/round-blue-widget-product1

I hope that all makes sense. But now I guess since I'm going to rewrite all the odd URL's to friendly ones after the holidays, maybe it doesn't matter at all? Although I'm still concerned about duplicate content at the moment.

I'm still thinking out the best format, but am leaning towards:

www.example.com/blue-widgets/round-blue-widgets/round-blue-widget-product1

and I do need the format of Main Category/Sub-Category/Product Pages.

Thanks!