When I link to the home page (index.html) of my site within my website, I get the following results:

<a href="/">text</a> results in www.example.com/

<a href="/index.html">text</a> results in www.example.com/index.html

Any ideas of how to create the link to where it would just be www.example.com showing in a browser after the link is clicked on (no slash or index.html)?

Thanks for any suggestions.

<a href="http://www.example.com/" title="home page" />Home</a>

HighRoller23 - thanks for the reply. I could be wrong, but your example still leaves a slash in the url once the visitor has arrived on the page. I could use the url www.example.com without the slash at the end, but this is for the internal linking of my site. For example,

in the exampe of a file: www.example.com/project1.index.html

I have set my internal links in my site set like:

<a href="/project1">text</a>

This makes sense. I just can't figure out how to link to the home page of our site (with an internal link) in this same way without creating a slash at end of url. Thanks for any suggestions.

I know using absolute urls internally within a site works, but I've seen over and over that this can slow things down. I was looking for a way to use a relative url to our home page, but that wouldn't leave a slash as the end result.

Originally Posted by andrew99

This makes sense. I just can't figure out how to link to the home page of our site (with an internal link) in this same way without creating a slash at end of url.

andrew99, have you ever seen a home page of any site without slash at the end? Its being added automaticaly, you cant do nothing about it, If I understand correctly what you are trying to do.

@andrew99
re-read your thread at http://www.webmaster-talk.com/websit...-question.html

You can mabey do server side redirects without the slash, if I know what your talking about.

chrishirst - Just wanted to let you know I wasn't trying to beat the issue with a stick. In the other topic you mentioned, I learned a lot and have made the changes in my site as a result. I just got hung up on how to link the index page internally.

I couldn't figure out how to do it without using a slash, and I was concerned using a slash would result in the search engines seeing our index page in two different ways (one with a slash and one without a slash). I was trying to create consistency - emphasize one url instead of two.

Even if I am not using slashes in the rest of my internal linking, I guess to link to the homepage, based on what is said here, I would use <a href="/">Home</a>

Let me know if this is the best way. Thanks for the suggestions.

With SEs the slash/noslash URIs are treated as identical because of the server redirect. Only when two different URIs produce a 200 response for the same content does it cause potential "issues".
IF you have .htaccess rewritten/aliased URIs (the so called "search engine friendly" URLs) these can be a problem because there will be no automatic server redirect.

I found this helpful resource on URI aliases: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/

chrishirst - just wanted to clarify. If what I'm understanding is correct, you are suggesting staying away from server side redirects (unless it's something link a 301, 302, etc). And for the internal linking within a site, stick with something like <a href="/">Home</a> for linking to the home page of that site?

So essentailly <a href="/">Home</a> will not be a URI aliase of http://www.mysite.com (for example, in the case of a backlink). URI aliases I guess is what we are trying to avoid. Thanks for any suggestions.

If what I'm understanding is correct, you are suggesting staying away from server side redirects

On the contrary, use redirects wherever necessary to keep duplicate content URIs to a minimum.

I'm not you have really grasped the entire concept of URI aliases, they are very useful when controlled properly and not simply abused into a keyword stuffing exercise.

chrishirst - I will have to do research into this (URI aliases). I use a lot of 301 redirects in my .htaccess, but that's about it.

As far as the internal linking to homepage issue, for now would you recommend I use something like <a href="/">Home</a> in my site, or will this cause issues with URI aliases (search engines seeing this as two different URIs because backlinks are just www.mysite.com)?

As far as the internal linking to homepage issue, for now would you recommend I use something like <a href="/">Home</a> in my site, or will this cause issues with URI aliases (search engines seeing this as two different URIs because backlinks are just www.mysite.com)?

That's perfectly ok. User Agent perform an operation called "normalisation" with URIs.
If the href value is not an absolute address, the HTTP_HOST value is prepended to the href. So a "/" is treated as the site root, and;
Not only would I recommend using the "/" as a "home" page href I would insist that it is used.

point well taken - thanks.

If you are worried about search engines, then I think you should be using absolute urls, even for the home page. More page-rank is passed to an absolute URL than to a relative URL.

More page-rank is passed to an absolute URL than to a relative URL

Says who ?? I don't believe absolute vs relative has anything at all to do with it.