Canonical URL for not the same texts. Can I do that?

[piernik]

I have travel website that has descriptions of cities which are landing pages. There is also a blog part with relations from our trips.
As consequence, we have very good text for let's say Cracow which is our landing page and couple of pages on our blog with unique texts about our trips to Cracow. Always with internal links to landing page.

I am worried about duplicate content. I know that these texts aren't the same, but have the same keywords. I think it could lower ranking for our landing page.
Can I add canonical URL to landing page in blog texts? As I said text are not the same and don't know if I can use canonical in that way.

Blog texts don't matter - they are only a diary and likely we will stop adding texts with the same keywords as our landing pages.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I would not suggest adding a canonical tag to your blog posts that points to your desired landing page. The blog posts and the important landing page do not have the same content from what you are describing. You do however have several options, here are a few of them, I recommend #3.

#1 - You could use your Google Search Console and look at which queries Google associates with which pages. Idealy you want to avoid your blog pages ranking for terms you want your important page ranking for. If you optimize the important page for all of those queries, and de-optimize the blog posts so that they don't do well for those specific terms, you should be fine.

#2 - You could move some or all of the content from the blog posts to the important landing page so that the blog posts don't outrank the important page.

#3 - You could feature your important landing page much more prominently within your site's internal link structure. This is what I would do first. More internal links pointing to your important landing page than your blog posts, and from more important pages, will tell Google which page is more important.

Even if you choose #3, which is Good SEO for any website, you should look into #1 and #2 as well because avoiding keyword canibalization is a good skill to learn.

Good luck!

BTW - It's good that you know which of your pages are more imporant to your site/business !

[piernik]

Thanks for great response. My landing pages are doing fine and internal linking always promote those - never blog posts. Blog posts most of the time are not showing in SERPs. But still I'm thinking that having more pages for the same keyword is my mistake that could lead to lower positions. That's why I'm thinking of canonical in blog posts.

[not2easy]

You should not make changes in an effort to manipulate results because that is something that can backfire. Every time Google decides that something can help a page do better, there are a lot of people trying to use that feature to do better without really fitting the purpose of the feature.

Canonical meta links were introduced because some platforms produce duplicate ways to see the same content. If you manually indicate that those pages are duplicates or partial duplicates when they clearly are not, it is simple for Google to spot and penalize.

Make changes that benefit visitors, not features that try to trick robots.