On the other hand, where there is another website linking out to a non-canonical URL such as example.com or example.com/index.html this may mean that the linked-to site does not get a full credit for that link when it is the URL www.example.com/ that will serve the content after the redirect.

The redirect is necessary. It removes the possibility of Duplicate Content issues, but there might still be some drawbacks when non-canonical URLs are used in links.

What’s important (and you haven’t addressed it) is the fact that people can link to your URL with or without the trailing slash.
And since Google doesn’t give you full recognition for a link that points to a 301 you want to make sure your site returns 200 for URL with AND without slash.

That is exactly what happen to my site, being dropped off the Google index because of an automatically added slash (and all of my links don’t have slashes)
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Is this true??

I never thought I would come across an article so pertinent to my long-held secret: I’ve always had a problem with “trailing” slashes. Im not an expert but I always understood that our root index page should be expressed as: http://wwww.example.com/ for instance. And that made sense, and I have tried to use that. Over the years though, I have found that many site submission companies would not accept this format. To make a long story short, I began designing various iterations of my site by using the following base href: http://www.example.com (i.e. no trailing slash). So as a result of that, I have always written links to internal directories in what I now assume is an incorrect format, as so: /MedwordStore/index.html. I preface internal links with the forward slash since the base reference doesn’t include one. I suppose I could change the base href in each directory to minimize the size of actual written links under each directory. I also work on our virtual server sometimes and, I may be wrong, but I thought the rule was that those directories are to be finished without a trailing slash?

Do I have any chance of redemption? Can I change my wrong-thinking and still make bad web designs?

[301 is your friend]

What’s important (and you haven’t addressed it) is the fact that people can link to your URL with or without the trailing slash.
And since Google doesn’t give you full recognition for a link that points to a 301 you want to make sure your site returns 200 for URL with AND without slash.

That is exactly what happen to my site, being dropped off the Google index because of an automatically added slash (and all of my links don’t have slashes)

If you make a living with a website this is something to take it into consideration.
If you just play with it we can discuss what’s cool and what’s not.

End story was I had to recode a few parts, and I had to add a slash to the end of every url, since I make heavy use of URL re-writing. I was about to look for a way to make my site “look cool” by having an option for a non-trailing urls, but your article straightened me out

http://www.w3.org/TR/chips/#uri

The thing that stands out to me most (and what most people misunderstand about URI’s because of Apache’s default configuration) is that a URI IS NOT a filesystem. Apache uses that as a convenient default because it’s a ‘quick and dirty’ way to map URI’s to resources on the filesystem. Apache provides many methods for making this mapping other than the filesystem. Modules such as mod_alias, mod_rewrite and mod_negotiation (as well as many others) are much more advanced methods of configuring your server for mapping URI’s to resources on the filesystem.

The ‘redirects that the server does automatically’ involving trailing slashes with URI’s is actually due to an Apache module called mod_speling. This module is activated in Apache’s default install and is one of the causes of this confusion!