5 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}
5 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}

Trailing slash for homepage backlinks?

by s888
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hey just wondering if anyone knows what's best for me to do. I originally heard that when building backlinks to your homepage, you just choose either www.example.com or www.example.com/ and stick to it.

Now I've heard otherwise and that it's better to make all your links to the homepage end in .com/, since the url a without slash is forwarded to the the url with a slash.

So far I've been doing all my links to the .com but I can see in webmaster that they've been found pointing to .com/. So should I break the consistency now and just make all my backlinks from this point onwards point to the .com/ ?
#backlinks #homepage #slash #trailing
  • Profile picture of the author networm
    It doesn't matter whether you have slash at the end of your homepage or not at all.

    What matters is using the www and without the www.

    For example...
    If you are using:
    Code:
    www.yourdomain.com
    be consistent on using it, instead of using;
    Code:
    yourdomain.com
    alternately.

    Doubt me? Watch this SEOMoz interview with Matt Cutts
    Code:
    http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[3366850].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author dburk
    Hi s888,

    It is considered a best practice to always use a trailing slash. There are a number of reasons this is better. Technically when you leave off the trailing slash it is a malformed URL and servers need extra programming to handle the error this creates.

    Google is pretty good at detecting the missing slash and they usually repair your URL when adding to their database. However this requires additional processing and bandwidth since they need to perform a redirect to determine the correct URL.

    While most servers can easily deal with this error, and correct through some sort of redirect, you risk the possibility that some of your backlinks won't hold the same value as a valid URL. While this is not a huge problem, I would hate to think, but for the use of a trailing slash, you would have beat a close competitor in ranking.

    For more information check out this article posted by Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal:
    http://www.searchenginejournal.com/l...-matter/13021/
    Signature

    * Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
    *     Don Burk Advertising & Marketing - www.donburk.com

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[3367445].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author s888
      Thanks, I'll start back linking with a slash from now on.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[3367941].message }}

Trending Topics