Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???

[GregB123]

Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL.

We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html

I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags...

Which should the canonical tag be???

(without the backslash)

or

(with the backslash)

Thanks for your help!

[Chris.Menke]

Gregory,

Matt Cutts has said that it doesn't matter algorithmically--essentially, Google deals with both as though they are one. I'd go with whatever your web server defaults to serving.  If visitors normally get a trailing slash, canonicalize that, if they don't canonicalize on the URL without the slash.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

[Modi]

Hi Gregory,
Its not a backslash (), rather a forward slash (/) you are referring to

The forward slash indicates that the url is ended. This tells the search engine: the request stops here.

Search Engines as correctly said by Chris does not differentiate between url with forward slash or without it - both are same. However, its advisable to have url ended with with forward slash to speed up the loading. To validate this - refer this excellent article - http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/why-urls-end-in-slash.htm

[GregB123]

Thanks you Chris and Gagan!

Your responses were fast and valuable