Is it worth doing a redirect without a slash?

Question

Google

Hello.
I have a site where ~100 pages are indexed and rank highly for topical queries. The problem is that there are a lot of duplicates in the webmaster, pages like: sitename.com/news/ 123/ and sitename.com/news/123 . I don’t have a redirect to a slash, search engines perceive it as two different pages, there are both with and without a slash in the search (the ratio is 30 to 70%).
Is it worth removing the slash through htaccess, and if so, will the pages that were with the slash not fall out?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If the advantage is in favor of pages without a slash, then redirect to without a slash. Ideally, it’s worth making it so that only one option works out, in your case it’s without a slash, with a slash it should give 404.
you need to achieve such a result that there is only one option in the issue, otherwise it will be duplicate content

Answer 2

If you select the URL option without a trailing slash,
you will need to disable slashes for directories - DirectorySlash Off,
otherwise you will get a circular redirect when accessing them
("page isn't redirecting properly").
With DirectorySlash Off, the DirectoryIndex option inside directories is ignored,
you will need to add mod_rewrite rules up a level to fix it.
At the same time, using mod_rewite inside the directories will not work,
the rules will need to be moved a level higher.

#
RewriteRule ^mydir$ /mydir/index.php [L,E=MYVAR:1]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_MYVAR} !1
RewriteRule ^mydir/$ /mydir [R=301,L]

#
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mydir
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /mydir/myapp.php [L,QSA]

404 is not worth giving away, 301 is enough for bots from duplicates.

Answer 3

Search engines handle 301 redirects quite correctly.
Or you can add the Link-canonical tag. Documentation from google .