Hello George, thank you for your helpful response. While I knew it was the case for absolute URLs and subdirectories, I was unsure whether it also pertained to the root domain. The link provided a helpful explanation, although SEO's have been, "reasonably sure that just about all search engines will be normalizing all those URLs to be the same," in the past only to have those certainties change unexpectedly. That being said, I think the forum made a good point in saying,"search engines generally don't want to deliberately add duplicates to their index."
With our canonical URL set to www.domain.com , do you believe there will be any loss of link juice with backlinks using both the domain.com and domain.com/ , or will it just be a better indicator to the search engines that both URLs are one in the same? Also do you think it matters that the domain root with the trailing slash is the one that shows up in the Google SERPs? --- to me that seems to indicate that Google prefers the root domain in directories to have a trailing slash