Backlinks: a curiosity

Is the same:

<a href="http://www.myexample.com" >anchor</a>

that

<a href="http://www.myexample.com/" >anchor</a>

?

If not, which should I use?

Thanks !

Dante

I could be wrong (still new at this also) but I believe those are both the same (the / does not change it). Rather what you should worry about is the "www" as you can have a two different PRs, 1) www.example.com and 2) http://example.com.

Hope that helps!

That is an interesting question which i would also like to know the answer to.

As for the previous poster.. Always decide for one and then also do backlinks to the one that you decide to..

They are treated exactly the same. There is no doubt about this.

However, I don't like the way the ..com/ looks so I always get rid of the slash, just my thing!

Yup - that trailing slash is meaningless.

Leaving it off seems (IMHO) to look better.

ClayShumate said:

I could be wrong (still new at this also) but I believe those are both the same (the / does not change it). Rather what you should worry about is the "www" as you can have a two different PRs, 1) http://www.example.com and 2) http://example.com.

Hope that helps!

Click to expand...

Yeah, and if you currently have backlinks both with and without www then just pick the one with the most link juice atm and build links for that url from now on.

Search engines are smart. You can almost be sure that when they are storing/ranking the links, they discard the trailing search.

Those are some of the nuances that developers deal with first before they even perfect the underlying algorithms.

The consensus here seems to be that they are the same. However, I do remember reading that they were NOT the same. I can't remember who it was, but it was one of the "big names" in SEO and backlink building.

While the following URLs all resolve to the same website, they are not counted the same when used as backlinks:

http://www.yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/index
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/

To back this up, I have checked the links on a couple of my sites in my Google Webmaster Tools. I have noticed that Google reports links to pages with and without the trailing slash SEPARATELY!!! If Google is reporting the links this way, it would make sense that they count them differently as well.

The bottom line is, BE CONSISTENT in your link building. Use the EXACT same form or the URL for each link you build. Then their won't be a question.

I don't think there's any difference between those 2.

A slash is not gonna change anything to the URL.

They are exactly the same.and you can set it in Google webmaster tool.