Trailing slash at end of urls

[ichthyous]

I have run some searches on WebmasterWorld regarding the "trailing slash problem", but all i see are references to mod rewrite. Is having a trailing slash at the end of a page's url a problem in terms of the search engines? I have a url-rewrite module in my new site that allows you to configure the urls. For example, it converts:

example.com/photos/landscapes/?g2_page=5
to:
example.com/photos/landscapes/5

and at the same time coverts:

example.com/photos/landscapes/park-autumn.html
to:
example.com/photos/landscapes/park-autumn/

I can choose to have the first set or the second set. Obviously the page number looks cleaner after it's been converted, and I like that the html extension is gone...but will the trailing slash cause any indexing problems?

Thanks

[g1smd]

For folders, and anything that you want to be treated as a folder, you must add the trailing / to the links.

There were several posts here about that subject in the last 3 days.

[ichthyous]

none of them are folders, they are html pages...will it cause problemos for them to be treated like folders?

[jdMorgan]

Although the convention is that folders have slashes and files don't, the search engines don't care. They don't index files or folders, they index URLs. Files and folders have meaning inside the server, while only URLs have meaning on the Web.

As long as your rewrite code on the server properly rewrites the appended-slash URL to the correct script with the correct name/value pairs in the query string, you'll be OK.

Jim