Trailing slashes, duplicate content and spam?

[love2spellcheck]

Hey everyone!

so a website has the homepage URL with a trailing slash and without, both indexed by Google.

e.g. domain.com
domain.com/

1) The site owner runs into the duplicate contnent issue.
2) It is easier for competitors to spam one of the URLs without getting noticed/hack.

I am sure about the first statement, does anyone have any thoughts regarding the second statement? Also I've heard that both of these URLs get indexed by Google, but has anyone actually seen it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[scyruck]

I wouldn't pay attention to it unless G is really indexing both.

If you are determined to address this enforce trailing slash redirects in the Yoast SEO WP plugin or else manually add the code to your .htaccess

Not 100% but this should work:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)([^/])$ /$1$2/ [L,R=301]

 

[love2spellcheck]

Thanks for the reply! That's what we know that it's not that crucial, but the developer is going nuts over this question. It's not a WP website, but the picture is that G didn't index both of these pages. Have you ever seen both of them actually indexed? The other question that we can't really figure out is about the spamming. The only thing we could come up with was that if we don't watch the backlinks on both of the URLs one of them could get spammed without us really notcing (but I highly doubt this). Same with hacking. Personally I think that trailing slashes don't make it easier to hack one of them, no brainer here.