Use a Slash for Homepage Links?

[TravG]

I read a little about whether to include a slash when linking to the homepage of a website and the answer I got out of everything is that you should because it is faster for the server but you should also be consistent whichever you choose to do.

I have always included the slash when I linked to my website from other sites ex.www.xyz123.com/ but when I look at my website homepage in a browser it depends which browser I look at whether the slash is included or not. IE includes the slash when you pull up the homepage but Chrome doesn't.

So what is the best way to link to your homepage or doesn't it really matter?
If you link using a slash on some links but not the slash on others are you splitting page rank?
Should/can you redirect the slash vs non slash in the htaccess file?

Thanks,

Travis

[wettFORM.AT]

I had a problem mit / and without / in the past. For search engines these are two differnt websites so if you send one url with / and one without / to the index or have it included in your sitemap .. this could lead to duplicate content .. I updated many pages and had the problem that most of them were uploaded twice so I would use cannonical or simply just use one type to avoid any problems.

[universal4]

Not really sure why ANY engine would consider a domain with and without the trailing slash as 2 different sites but the web server considers them the same website.

Also, if your htaccess points back at the www name with the trailing slash, would that not also fix some antiquated search engine that sees it as 2 sites? (if not, could that engine not see 4 duplicate sites?)

Rick
Universal4

[sweetbet]

I don't think that including or not including a slash makes much of a difference to be honest.

[wettFORM.AT]

I have also no idea why search engines work like that but you can read this in their guidelines that they see pages with / and without / as completely different websites .. unfortunately I could not find the screenshot but I clearly had both urls in the index and the search engine automatically excluded one from the results .. if you do not use cannonical or exclude it completely then this could lead to traffic problems .. I changed all urls without / to urls with / at the end .. the result was that the reporting tool showed 0 pages indexed so the search engine tried to exclude all existing ones and use the new ones instead .. in this situation you would loose all rankings because these are all new urls

[universal4]

Although I feel it isn't logical, the main way I can see this happening is if you have both listed in your sitemap.

I have seen some sitemap programs do this.

Rick
Universal4

[wettFORM.AT]

even when they are not in the sitemap at the same time when you sent one version before and changed it then you sent both versions to the index and this could cause problems. I would keep the version that was in the index first.

[pinkytoe]

Yea it's not really important in my opinion.