How do Search Engines treat the trailing slash in URLs?

[Mercy_Livi]

Hi Guys,

Have a pretty tricky question (atleast for I am concerned). If i have files as below in my website,

domain. com/ category-1/article01
domain. com/ category-1/article01/

>> How SE treat them?

* Are both the structure mentioned above same?
* If not how it affects SE?

Looking for clarification!

[vicky]

'/' has nothing to do with the SEO. i will explain it in context of a TLD. actually the browser communicates to the server requesting domain.com. first the server looks for a file called domain.com and can't find anything. it then adds a '/' and tries to find a directory called domain.com. then the server returns the default file for the directory. so if a browser requests [domain.com...] instead of htp://www.domain.com/, the visitor is actually being redirected to [domain.com....] this forces the web server to work harder than it needs. hence you should always use the trailing slash.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], Mercy_Livi!

MSN and Y! will strip the trailing slash.
G will index whichever url you serve.
in your example it is possible to serve content at one url or the other or both.
it is also possible to serve different content for those urls.
technically the first url serves a resource named article01 from the root directory and the second url serves the directory listing or index page for the article01 directory.
also note that either url could be internally rewritten or externally redirected to give you a different response from what you thought you were requesting.

'/' has nothing to do with the SEO.

any url canonicalization problem can affect seo.

[semgold]

I think the most important thing to remember is when your linking internally stay consistent. If you link to your home page on one page using a trailing slash always link using the trailing slash and visa versa.

[Mercy_Livi]

Technically the first url serves a resource named article01 from the root directory and the second url serves the directory listing or index page for the article01 directory.
also note that either url could be internally rewritten or externally redirected to give you a different response from what you thought you were requesting.

>> SO its not advisable to have trailing Slash in URL in terms of SEO? Since Google with index as it is wth trailing slash and Y and L will truncate them and index. I will not have same uRL around SEs. Also this creates canonical ISSUE as u have mentioned!

Plz advice guys!