Someone asked Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam, on Twitter if Google would treat the same subdirectory as different pages if the URLs are slightly off.

The example give were:

http://domain.com/dir
http://domain.com/dir/
http://domain.com/dir.html

For most of you, the answer is pretty obvious. Most of the time, no, Google will figure it out. But Matt Cutts said theoretically, Google can treat them differently. When? I assume when the content on each of those versions are unique from each other.

Matt Cutts responded on Twitter saying “in theory those can all be different.” He added, Google does make a decision on when to merge them or not.

Here is his tweet:

Forum discussion at Twitter.