Without slash URLs not redirected with slash URLs; but canonicalised: Any potential harm at Google?

[vtmoz]

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

[effectdigital]

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.