Need help dealing with duplicate content - how to use safely?

[lina]

My location-based website has a blog that contains (among other things) hotel and restaurant reviews. I'm now creating city guides, and want to re-use some of the reviews in the city guides. In the city guides, I have the restaurant listings formatted with a page that has ten or so reviews of my favorite restaurants in the city. The blog posts are longer and more detailed. So for the city guide, I'd like to use a paragraph from the various blog posts, with a link to the longer more detailed blog post. I can't figure out how to use rel=canonical in this case, because I'd have to make the city guide page with the snippets the most important page, which I don't think it is. But I can't put ten canonical links from the city guide snippets page to the individual blog posts. Any suggestions? I don't know much about dealing with duplicate content so I'm sure I'm confusing the whole issue.

[lucy24]

I can't figure out how to use rel=canonical in this case

Snap answer: "not at all". rel=canonical is for when two or more URLs serve identical or near-identical content. Not just a random paragraph: the entire page.

[lina]

Thanks! In some cases the blog posts are short, so I will want to use the whole thing in the city guide. Is this something I just shouldn't be worrying about?

[Sudipto]

Hi Lina,

It is somehow OK if you are thinking about using the entire thing to your city guide page by setting up the canonical but please remember that then you could reduce usability or 'user experience' of that city-guide page itself. Why not take time and write unique content for every single city-guide page. You will gain better trust and authority.

[tangor]

Depends on how extensive (repeated) same content might be... and the context how it is used. Your expanded page using snippets from shorter, less detailed pages should be okay with the entire expanded page being "different" enough to rank on its own.