What is the correct address I should enter when linking to my site?

Hi there,

I've noticed that when most people get links to their website they link to http://www.xyz.com/ instead of linking to http://www.xyz.com.

(They include a forward slash at the end of their domain name).

Why is this? Also, if my domain is http://www.paid2review.co.uk should I also put the forward slash after my website address?


Thanks for any help.
Matt

 

It is just a practise. there is no difference from seo or Pagerank point of view...

 

Why do people do it? Just a habit?


Thanks

 

It does make a difference depending on the default file served by your server.

the proper way is http://www.yourdomain.com/

Nice to see a league fan here

 

Yup, I love it

So I should be linking like http://www.paid2review.co.uk/

How would this affect the links I place in directories etc?


Thanks

 

It's the same thing

 

Two people say it's the same thing, one person says it's not the same thing... Anyone else got an opinion? Is there some sort of website/article that might be able to re-assure me?

Thanks

 

I prefer the trailing slash as well.

Several reasons:

• It looks proper and is a best practice
• Doing so will force you to maintain consistent link structure with subdirectories
• Server request issue- Say you have http://yourdomain.com/subdir - You definitely want a trailing slash because then the server knows it is a directory that is being requested.

 

Without a trailing slash, the server requests /whatever as a file. It has too look for it. That takes time and resources. Then it looks for a directory. Time and resources.

 

From an SEO perspective its the same thing, but from a usability and best practices point of view cianuro is correct, and that is the way I do it too.

 

Oh right okay, so from now on I should put my link as http://www.paid2review.co.uk/ ?

Thanks for the help.

 

Yes, you're welcome Mickey Love.

 

Lol thanks a lot, rep has been given

In the past I've always submitted my website to directories and sites without the forward slash, would this have done much harm to my site?

 

It wouldn't have hurt your site at all.

Personally I think the trailing slash on just the domain name doesn't look that great for aesthetic reasons. Look around the web at the big sites. Do you see any of them putting the trailing slash in their advertising?

Also, unless you're running some super heavy site on a laptop, I wouldn't worry about the resource implications of using it. Most web servers run at fractions of their max utilization and this will have no measurable impact on the vast majority of sites.

 

it give you the same result but with the / can make sure you wont typed your url wrong. I have seen many people typed like http://www.example.co and that domain is not exist so with / might help.