What does the "/" at the end of a URL mean? When should it be used?

Question

Many times I am asked to enter a URL into a browser or into an online form. Sometimes I see URLs written with a "/" at the end, sometimes not. I have been told that it makes no difference, but I know that is not always true. Compare...
http://www.newsguide.us/health-medical
vs
http://www.newsguide.us/health-medical/
One has a page rank of 4, the other has a page rank of 0. They look very similar, but the content is different.
What does the "/" at the end of the URL mean? Are they really 2 different web pages??

Answer 1

The above answers are useful and close but not fully accurate. In short a trailing "/" character signifies that you are pointing to a directory as opposed to a file. Now when used in a web site the server will often translate both URIs to the same actual file but not always. If you ever play around with security policies on a web server you'll see this in action (I would suggest Tomcat or Apache if you do want to experiment).



From wikipedia:



* Adding trailing / Directories are indicated with a trailing slash and should be included in URLs. Example:



http://www.example.com → http://www.example.com/





If you want to learn more about the full syntax of URIs or URLs Wikipedia does have good section on URL normalization:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization#Normalization_process



Or you can go directly to the standards document:



http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

Answer 2

the backslash refers to folder hierarchies. Designers / Coders will design their site with folders to help them organize the information, it also helps the user understand where they are in the website.

For instance - when you click on the 'health' button - you'll notice that the url changes to:

http://www.newsguide.us/health-medical/health

health is a new folder where data is contained - you (user) can't see the folder but it helps to understand how it works.

There isn't any difference if you have the slash at the end of the url or not - it always retrieves the default page...

Answer 3

To simplify writing IP addresses it has now become common practice to define a list of IP addresses using a slash (more properly IP Prefix) notation. The IP address to the LEFT of the SLASH (/) is the Network (base) IP address.



When a server opens a link in the form of “http://www.domain.com/about” it will need to figure what kind of file or webpage is contained on that address, wasting time on the process. If instead of using that link you include a slash (”/”) at the end like “http://www.domain.com/about/” the web server will already know that the link points to a directory, reducing the time to load the page.



The improvement on the loading time of links ending with a slash will not be astronomical, but when it comes to speeding up a website every small bit helps!



Ron

Answer 4

It means whatever the site wants it to mean. What does the "health-medical" mean? It's poor design, but a web server can serve you completely different content based on small details in the URL if it wants to.



What Web Designer said is correct in that this is what it *usually* means. However, there is no law that says it has to mean that for any particular site.

Answer 5

The 'Net grew up in Unix. It uses a lot of Unix syntax when you are running a program like ftp or ssh or telnet from the command line. In Unix the separator between directories is "/" as opposed to "\" which it is in windows.



Generally I would avoid using it unless I'm typing a subdirectory after it. There are plenty of occasions when your address is going to be completed with it, and when it does the results can be a 404 error.