Without slash URLs not redirected with slash URLs; but canonicalised: Any potential harm at Google?
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Hi friends,
Our website pages without slash are not redirecting to with slash and vice-versa. Both the versions are returning 200 response code. Both the versions are pointed to with slash URLs with rel-canonical tags. Is this right setup? Or we need to redirect one another to slash or without slash versions?
Thanks
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The potential harm is that, even though canonical tags stop duplicate content from being a problem - they don't do much to consolidate backlink authority hitting each web-page. If you have two pages which both have links pointing to them (with "/" and without "/") then only 301s will properly 'merge' those URLs (assuming that their content is near identical) in terms of backlink authority.
For this reason, a real architectural solution is always better than using canonical tags. Canonical tags are really a fall-back measure, if you have poor on-site architecture which you fundamentally cannot change. The end goal, though, is not to need them.
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