Permalink question

[MikePatch]

For 5 years I have used the permalink custom structure: /%postname% without the end backslash. I didn't think the difference was that big of a deal, yet last month I was curious of what benefits would happen if I made the change. To my surprise my rankings took a slight dive, but recovered stronger than before. As the URL itself doesn't require a redirect the posts and pages loaded the same with or wothout the "/"

But now in Open Site Explorer, all my URL's have no page Authority. All the links i built were pointing to links without the backslash: example.com/post-name

Questions:

1. Did Google figure out the change, hence the dip in rankings and strong return?
2. Will keeping /%postname%/ even though many links are pointing to a non backslash URL comeback to haunt me?
3. Is there anything I can do to help lead Google to better see the changes I've made?

thx

[Matt-Williamson]

Placing something like this in your .htaccess file will redirect every page on your site without a "/" to one with a "/" without having to specify over 3k URLs individually.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://example.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

[MikePatch]

There is over 3K articles on this site. I have done a 301 direct on the pages that are ranked but how do you 301 all urls? It can't be done can it?

[Matt-Williamson]

Have you considered putting a 301 redirect in place so that the none trailing slash URLs that have links pointing to them redirect to the trailing slash version as that is now your preferred format? It will help reduce duplicate content and cut the potential of wasting link juice if some links point to one version and some to the other. You also need to make sure that your navigation structure is updated to point to the trailing slash version rather than being redirected to it.