How do i ask everybody to link to my site

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

[illusionist]

How do i ask everybody to link to my site, [widgets.com...] or [widgets.com...] is there any difference are these seen as different urls because of the back slash?

[layer8]

For inbound links they are treated the same, its your domain name that is important. On your root domain it makes no difference, if you are pointing downstream to a sub-section then the one with / is obviously a folder and the one without is either file or folder.

I'd get them to point to the one without the backslash.

[jamesa]

Technically you want the trailing forward slash (that's a forward not a backslash, btw). Though most browsers (and presumably spiders) today will add the foward slash for you -- the browser just assumes that's what you meant because in the raw protocol it wouldn't work otherwise.

I'd use the trailing slash by choice, but wouldn't stress over it if there were any links that didn't have it.

Speaking of raw protocol, here's what actually happens behind the scenes (for those who love the gory details):
1) the browser (or spider) connects to the server (in this case www.widgets.com) on port 80,
2) server replies, basically saying "ok, what do you want?",
3) browser says GET /
4) the server replies with the source code of the requested page.
So... without the slash the browser/spider wouldn't know what to "GET".