: Trailing slash on Root folder - Is it possible to remove it without 301? I have noticed something very strange on the site I'm working on. We currently only show http://www.example.com. The
I have noticed something very strange on the site I'm working on. We currently only show www.example.com. The URL www.example.com/ (slash at the end) gets 301'd to www.example.com.
Now this is all very standard stuff except I noticed that "Screaming Frog" (an SEO tool) refused to crawl my site. When I spoke to their tech team they said it was because I was 301ing the slash to the non-slash and I "should fix that error".
To me that makes no sense as I thought many other sites such BBC.com and even google.com get rid of the trailing slash for the root domain.
However on closer inspection I don't think they're using either 301 or 302 HTTP responses. Because when I use web-sniffer.net/ to test google.com/ I get a 200 response AS well as google.com. However when I view google.com/ there is NO trailing slash. How does this happen?
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www.example.com/ and www.example.com are the same URL. Whether or not the trailing slash is shown in the browser address bar is purely cosmetic - when the request is sent to the server the slash will be included. (http://www.example.com/foo and www.example.com/foo/ on the other hand are different URLs.)
If the site you're working on is somehow redirecting one to the other, this does sound like a mis-configuration, and it's possible that browsers are just smart enough to ignore it. If you can provide the URL we can easily check the headers being returned to see if this is what's happening.
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