Trailing slash

[rbai]

Our homepage never had trailing slash and we always pointed internal and external links to homepage URL with no trailing slash. Our canonical also has no trailing slash. Recently our SEO agency is asking us to change it to trailing slash. Is it required as part of best SEO practices?

[CleverPhD]

Trailing slash or no trailing slash - it does not matter, you just need to be consistent.  I would also make sure that the no trailing slash 301 redirects to the URL with the trailing slash (or vice versa).

The only reason you need to look at trailing slashes is when you have a reporting system that needs the trailing slash to differentiate between folders.  i.e.  website.com/folder vs website.com/folder/  The first without the slash is a page within the root folder and the second is a foler within the root folder.

I am not aware of an "advantage" of having the slash vs not on the home page URL, per se though.  You SEO company may reason that more people with link to you with a trailing slash (I am not aware of any data on average to support this - your mileage may vary), and if that is the case you are losing link juice through the 301 from the non slashed version to the slashed version on those links to your home page.   301 redirects work and pass equity as long as the two pages are semantically related, I would not think that a 301 from a non slashed to a slashed would cause any issue.  Getting back to above, I am not sure that I see any reason to change what you have.  Ask the SEO company what reason they have and have them make a real reason vs a generic "best practice" answer.

[rbai]

The answer I got from them is as follows

"the default URL that all bots use has the trailing slash.  So they start with the trailing slash and then split out from there.  So it’s best practice to always use the trailing slash version on all home page links and canonicals"

[CleverPhD]

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

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.

Note the quote from John Mueller in the comments

_Lots of good advice from an older blog post that's still valid & relevant today. _

There may be some technical merit that Googlebot starts at the slashed version on the TLD, but I do not think there is any type of SEO advantage with that (if that is the case).