Canonicalization Question

[jezsez]

Due to 2 bad errors, my site is not only listing versions of the same page with "/" and without "/" it's also listing old pages that were 301 redirected to newer pages on my server.

My question is: how do I deal with it? The .htaccess is now correct (it got overwritten) and the URL base is now once again correct (the "/" got deleted!!) what do I do with all the extra pages that I don't want? There are about 70 to 100. Is it worth noting them all and removing the URL's via WMT? Someone suggested that it could be dangerous to do that. I'd like some advice please.

[hcancelik]

what exactly do you mean with / and without / ?

If you have two duplicate pages you can redirect(301) the ones you don't want and they will eventually get replaced on the search engine results.

[weegillis]

With '/' and without '/' would be two different URL's.

href="/mypage.html" would be one; href="mypage.html" would be another. This problem is not easily solved, except to repair all the URL's on the site to one state or another.

A canonical tag won't be much help, since you would need one in every static page. They are really only useful for dynamic pages where most of the content is similarly derived from template and boilerplate, and only unique data sets them apart. A canonical tag in this sense would 'suggest' a central page be indexed, and the dynamic pages be ignored.

[webdevelopment]

You can also remove the URLs from Google's search results with the help of Google Webmaster Tool's Remove URL feature.