When I'm sharing links with other websites, should I publish those links with or without backslashes on the end of the url like this » Example A » http://example.com/ Example B » http://example.com Which link works best. This question is mainly related to link popularity. It is a fact that link popularity is affected when you use www as a prefix for your domain. That is to say, if you used www on 50% of your links and did not use www on the other 50%, you would have half the link popularity. Therefore, if you use a backslash on 50% of your links (assuming your sharing your domain only and not a specific page) would you get half the link popularity in this example? Any thoughts on this? » Respectfully, GreenLED
Always use the forward slash. Take a read of Matt's comment about it. He doesn't admit that it could cause a problem but he does suggest using it.
I was overjoyed to know that i have been posting my links with the forward slash as a regular habit !
It requires one less operation for your server as well, when you include the closing slash...not that it makes that much of a difference.
If you're listing just the domain name as the URL, your browser automatically includes a "/" at the end (since this is actually required for the HTTP GET request). However, if you're linking deeper into a site and including a directory, such as: http://www.example.com/products Your server will automatically return a 301 redirect if you should have included a trailing "/". (Your browser doesn't know if "products" is a filename or a directory, so it's up to the server to correct it if it's wrong.) I think Google doesn't love redirects, so you might want to include the trailing slash where required. (I verified the 301 with HTTP Analyzer.)