As a blogger, you should know that Google and search engines that use its algorithms will penalize your blog posts that appear to show duplicate content. There are numerous ways to prevent it from happening within your blog, but what about from outside your blog? If you do a search for a specific keyword in one of your blog posts and it appears twice in the search results, it may be because one result shows with a trailing slash and one shows without a trailing slash. This is considered duplicate content.

If you're using the standard URLs created by WordPress and aren't using the rewrite directives in your .htaccess file to create fancy permalinks, this plugin will have no bearing. You can stop reading now. You can also stop reading if you use the fancy permalinks and added the 301 permanent redirect I provided in my article, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for WordPress, Part 1. This plugin is for those who: 1) Use a web server that doesn't support .htaccess, 2) Don't have access to the .htaccess file due to host restrictions, or 3) Are simply afraid of editing the .htaccess file and screwing things up.

For those that do use the fancy permalinks and haven't touched any .htaccess files, the Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin solves the trailing slash problem by having your web server issue a 301 permanent redirect for a request URI that doesn't have the trailing slash to the URI that does. This ensures there will never be more than one URL pointing to a specific blog post. It does exactly the same thing as the aforementioned .htaccess code, but from within WordPress.

Managing the redirect may not seem important at the moment, but I'm willing to bet it has a huge effect on your Google PageRank. Installation of the plugin is quick and simple. The .htaccess code takes almost as little time. Why take a chance and not use either one?

Note: I was searching for something completely different and stumbled on that blog instead.