Trailing slash in Google Search Console

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ammon Johns: A trailing slash is the correct and proper form of URL for any root directory or subdirectory where the default or index page of that directory would be used.
  
  Technically, without the trailing slash is wrong, and bad use of the protocols, and only supported because the web had to work for idiots too.
  
  
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  נתן גאידאי: Ammon Johns so all of my properties that are showcasing .com and not .com/ are giving me wrong data?
  
  
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  Ammon Johns: Not exactly, no. It`s showing you what it considers to be the primary, main, or canonical format of URL used.
  
  Google didn`t invent the internet. They didn`t invent the HTTP protocols or any of the `rules` and standards that underlie it all. It was already all up and running and doing good business before Google was even a company.
  
  And thousands of not too smart people were already struggling to understand the internet, and doing a lot of things wrongly or badly.
  
  But the Internet was designed to work with computers. And computers have operating systems, and file systems, which can vary. To be able to work equally well with a Mac O/S, and a Unix O/S, and various flavours of Linux, plus DOS and Windows, all equally well, there had to be a simple set of guidelines or rules, called protocols, that each O/S could adapt correctly to what it needed to know to access the data correctly.
  
  Those rules are the HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) which is what made the Internet into the Web. It is distinct from the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) which were an earlier way to transfer data from one machine to another, (and were initially the main way that HTTP documents and files got uploaded and managed).
  
  In a computer, you have all sorts of documents, files, programs, and to know what each one is, and how to handle it, we have file extensions.
  
  readme.txtresume.docgame.exe garden.jpgindex.htm
  
  These are all just packets of data, but the last bit of each, the bit that comes after the period (dot) is the file extension, that lets the machine know how to handle that file, or what application to handle it with.
  
  So, given that, the protocol was very specific that because periods (dots) were used in the HTTP protocols, BOTH as a domain and subdomain identifier, AND for specific file extensions (.html, .jpg, .gif, .txt, etc.) whenever a dot is NOT used as a file extension, you must use a trailing slash, to tell the other machine it is NOT a file extension, but the other use.
  
  The trouble was, of course, that they let Americans use it. The only nation on earth that never worked out how to use its own CCTLD and did everything as a global TLD. And as with most things, they screwed up, a lot, and it was easier to make the software adapt to them, than try to make them smarter.