Everybody knows that backlinking is an important part of any Seo campaign but what few people don't realise is, that a lot of people are building their backlinks the wrong way. This confusion is caused by the visual appearance of your domain name or URL address in the browser window. 90% of the time when you look at your own home page URL in the browser window there is never any trailing slash behind the domain extension.
For example: mysite.com/
Although you can't visually see the trailing slash behind your URL in the browser whilst on the homepage of your website it is always still there, it's just that the browser omits the trailing slash to visually beautify the URL. If you've been building your backlinks to your homepage with out the trailing slash behind your domain extension, i.e.com/, then you've been building backlinks to a URL that doesn't really exist. Many people get causght out by this and it also aplies to your onsite Seo via your internal baclinks.
The only reason that a Backlink without the trailing slash resolves to the correct URL is because this issue is taken care of by the.htaccess file or the web server. If you've been omitting the trailing slash from behind your domain name when building backlinks then you've effectively been building backlinks pointing to a 301 redirect. By building backlinks incorrectly like this you've been wasting a percentage of the juice that is passed through the Backlink pointing to your website.
If you highlight your homepage URL in the browser and copy and paste it into notepad you will notice that after the main extension of the domain name there is always a trailing slash behind it, i.e.com/
This forward slash behind the extension tells the web browser to visit a specific folder and when the trailing slash isn't there the web browser is trying to view files that it cannot find. Luckily this is all taking care of by the .htaccess file but the main takeaway point of this backlinking lesson is to realise that when you build back links to what is effectively a 301 redirect some of the PR and domain authority is leaking out through the 301 redirect. The safest way to build back links to your site is to ensure you always visit the page you're building a back link to an copy the URL directly from the browser window. Then paste the URL into notepad and you'll have a copy of the exact URL that you're meant to be building your back links to.
