Robert_Charlton - 6:20 am on Oct 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

After reading it here, I changed it and took out the end slash. In 2 days, the home page is the first page that shows up in a site: search.

ecmedia - I think you misread things here with regard to the end slash. Actually, the variant with the end slash is the "preferred" form, but only in the sense that if it's not there, just about all servers are set up to add it... so having it in your code saves the server a little work. I believe any change you observed due to dropping the slash was purely coincidental.

The problem is not when you link to:
http://www.example.com/

It's when you link to:
http://www.example.com/index.html
http://www.example.com/index.asp
http://www.example.com/home.jsp
etc...

That creates dupe content, which can give you trouble if people link to it and it starts to rank.

I suggest you read this thread, which is up in the Hot Topics section at the top of the Google Search forum home page....

Domain Root vs. index.html [webmasterworld.com] - another kind of duplicate