Final slash or no final slash. Is there a difference?

http://www.widgets.com/ or http://www.widgets.com

[atlrus]

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but if somebody knows the answer it would be great:

What is the difference between

[widgets.com...]

and

[widgets.com...]

And which one should we use when we exchange links, for example?
I know that Yahoo shows it's results as "www.widget.com" and Google as "www.widgets.com/", but is there a difference at all?

[mcavic]

For consistency, I think you should always include the slash on the end. If you leave the slash off, most Web servers will redirect to the page with a slash, so on a high traffic site, you could save a small amount of bandwidth.

[py9jmas]

[example.com...] does not exist. Any browser when given such a URL will request [example.com...]

If the browser doesn't, and sends a request such as:

GET HTTP/1.0

it will get an error. The browser will send

GET / HTTP/1.0

even if it doesn't show the slash in the GUI (ie IE). The '/' between the hostname and the path is special, and can't be left out of the HTTP request.

[atlrus]

Ok, I get what you are saying about the browser.
However, I was wondering what the difference is between then two when a search engine craws a link.
Would it matter to the Bot if it had slash at the end or not?

[mcavic]

True about www.example.com. The real question is what about www.example.com/widget

Both versions will work. If one of them doesn't, the server is broken. The only reason it would matter is for consistency.

Likewise, the only reason why a bot or search engine would care is if it crawls both versions and considers them duplicate content. But if the engine thought that way, it would happen with millions of sites.