difference between http://www.website.com and http://www.website.com/

is there a difference?

[dopecoder]

Ive been doing some link exchange and i use http://www.example.com/ as the link url.

However i was going through my site and i realised that most of the internal links to the homepage are http://www.example.com

is there a difference between the two? should i be sticking with one type of url? which one?

[edited by: martinibuster at 11:25 pm (utc) on June 5, 2006]
[edit reason] Examplified URL. [/edit]

[pshea]

If you run some searches or do a link:, you will see the trailing slash does not change the results, so you have to conclude then, no difference. However, it is a very good practice to include the trailing slash when asking for links to your homepage as it eliminates the other site from unwittingly include the following space (%20) as part of your website name which would not result in a good link back to you.

[BobPar]

Google does like the forward slash.

[naitsirhc26]

Is that one of the reasons Google doesn't always crawl all of my pages?

[sugarrae]

naitsirhc26 - that is a Google search question, not a question for the link development forum, so if you'd like to discuss that, please head over to the Google search forum and craft a new message there. Let's keep this thread on topic, thanks.

[wmuser]

Correct link is http://www.example.com/

[Car_Guy]

A link to example.com will automatically forward to example.com/

A link to example.com/ will load quicker than one to example.com because the user's browser doesn't have to send a second request to the server in order to arrive at the same place.