Difference Between www.domain.com and www.domain.com/ ?

[jimmy0225]

Hi,

Of course, it is obvious that when other sites link to you, they choose how to do so in terms of the anchor text.  My questions is:

1. Most of the domain names I see on the web are: www.domain.com/ however, I am pretty sure that when someone thinks you have a site that there members can benefit by they will link to: www.domain,com , am I coorect in stating that the search engines (SE) see these as two separate and distinct domains?

2. If so, are these too, then these must be different and distinct as well: www.domain.com/best-service vs. www.domain.com/best-service/

**I went on that assumption and have created 301 directs for the latter example. **

3. How would one check to see if a 301 direct is in place?

As always, I am appreciated to this site and member's skills.

Jim

[danatanseo]

My IT Director and I just had an interesting back and forth discussion about this. I'll spare you the witty repartee and take you straight to a post in the Google Webmaster's Central Blog:

To Slash or Not to Slash?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Quote:

"If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:

• Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
• Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay.
• Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris."

We particularly enjoyed Maile Ohye's reference to Chuck Norris. It's handy as a search term if you ever want to find her post again   Hope this helps!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

1. Same domain, but they are different pages.

2. Yes, those would be considered different pages.

3. I use the Chrome Extension: Redirect Path.  It creates a little widget in the header of my browser to show me when a redirect happened, and what kind of redirect it is.