why does "/" help improve your PR and search ranki

we have noticed that generally URLS with "/" on the end get more improved rankings.

Why? Are there any articles relating to this?

for example

www.widgets.com/

has a higher ranking than

www.widgets.com/

subsequently

www.widgets.com/small/

has a higher search engine ranking than

www.widgets.com/small

all because of this "/" at the end

/ at the end makes the web address resolve faster.. however I am not sure if that is why.

So it's a good idea with link exchanges to ask them to put www.mydomain.com/ then?

Cheers
Wardy

Don't know never looked in to it.

Thing about the / is you would never tell someone your site is called whatever.com/ you would just say .com.. however when the person is online it will make it faster (and we are talking fractions of a second here) for a domain with a / to load than one without... and don't ask me why that is, I don't know never looked in to why.

I always link with a / at the end. The reason, IMHO, that Google and other SEs prefer this is because it 'forces' the spider to seek data in the directory.

i.e. the / is like saying to the spider 'follow this URL, there's lots of lovely content to be found'

I think it's similar to the META tag 'follow,all'