Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?

[webestate]

Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?

www.example.com/services

Or

www.example.com/services**/**

Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?

[Highland]

Google will generally see these as the same but, as Matt Cutts says here, there is a slight preference for the trailing slash

[CleverPhD]

My two cents, even though Google "generally" sees them the same, I would not allow this to happen so that I can be as specific as possible for Google.

A separate reason to use slashes at the end of the URL is that this is what tools like Google Analytics use to group and sort traffic results.  There are default drill down reports that look at the ending slash to determine traffic to a given directory.   If you are inconsistent with the use of the slash, then you may have some traffic allocated to one directory versus another.

I prefer use of the slash for this reason as well.

Cheers

[webestate]

Thanks for the responses.  I found a good explanation here also

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.htmlThis post from Google Webmasters says that either one is fine.  Just make sure you do one or the other.Regarding your root domain -

• 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.