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Another option for you, with a high quality business and site, is a newspaper story. Contact me by Private message if you think that will work and I will interview you for a story.

Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site.  Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog.  The article pages were evergreen content.  So, I would redirect those posts to the article page.  I thought that it helped rankings. I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.

Hi GYMSN, If you have a rel=canonical already then you should not worry. canonical tag was released to solve the problem of creating duplicate content through different path to the same page. If you already have the "/" in the canonical, then I wouldn't advice to make any change. You are ready to optimize further other parts of the website. Good luck Istvan