Strange SEO Findings - Part 1

So recently I have been spending quite a bit of time preparing a number of “how to” guides for my blog. One of the guides I’m putting together is on developing a website structure that is

a. Good for optimisation, and provides keyword rich urls, and
b. Makes the site easy to manage as it grows.

While researching this, I had a bit of a scare! I noticed while brosing one of the sites that I am working on, that every time I entered the url as www.amstore.co.uk, the browser would automatically add a “/” to the end.

I then noticed that google was indexing the site as www.amstore.co.uk/ in its search results. Baring in mind that I have spent the last few months linking to the site without the end “/” this was a little concerning.

My heart sank at the thought that maybe the two are actually treated as completely separate urls and that all of the links I had done would be completely invalid :-(

So I jumped on a number of forums and luckily the general consensus seems to be that the urls are treated as being exactly ythe same site. Therefore, it seems not to matter which you use.

Still not 100% sure why google adds it though, so have to keep you posted when I find out more!