Trailing Slash vs. Index.html

[jk3210]

Geez, after 17 years on the net I feel like I should know this one, but I never really considered it before...

Will Google see these two urls as the same location or different?

www.example.com/dir/dir/
www.example.com/dir/dir/index.html

[phranque]

those are different urls and i've seen examples of both or the wrong one being indexed.
requests for the second url should be redirected to the first url using a 301 status code.
also your default directory index document setting should be configured to use index.html.

[jk3210]

Thanks much, phranque.

[g1smd]

Never link to named index file.

Link to href="/" or to href="/folder/"

[lucy24]

Will Google see these two urls as the same location or different?

www.example.com/dir/dir/
www.example.com/dir/dir/index.html

It gets better :) Unless you've given instructions to the contrary, those can end up as four URLs:

www.example.com/dir/dir/
example.com/dir/dir/
www.example.com/dir/dir/index.html
example.com/dir/dir/index.html

[g1smd]

another three variants...

www.example.com./dir/dir/
www.example.com:80/dir/dir/
www.example.com.:80/dir/dir/