Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?

[digitalhothouse]

Hi all,

We're creating a section for a client that is based on road trips - for example, New York to Toronto. We have a 3 day trip, a 5 day trip, a 7 day trip and a 10 day trip. The 3 day trip is the base, and then for the 5 day trip, we add another couple of stops, for the 7 day trip, we add a couple more stops and then for the 10 day trip, there might be two or three times the number of stops of the initial 3 day trip.

However, the base content is similar - you start at New York, you finish in Toronto, you likely go through Niagara on all trips. It's not exact duplicate content, but it's similar content. I'm not sure how to look after it?

The thoughts we have are:1) Use canonical tags 3,5,7 day trips to the 10 day trip.
2) It's not exactly duplicate content, so just go with the content as it is

We don't want to get hit by any penalty for duplicate content so just want to work out what you guys think is the best way to go about this.

Thanks in advance!

[RyanPurkey]

To me this seems like something that would work better on one page, just from the potential of upsells and CRO. Plus you'd have more content and strength potential dedicated to the one page regardless of trip duration which would be better for search.  I'd cluster something like this.  Cheers!

[digitalhothouse]

Thanks Ryan!

It's more for content marketing than for selling anything - we are going to have multiple 3 days, multiple 5 days etc. Our thought process was if we can have different pages, then we can optimise around "new york to toronto 3 day trip", "new york to toronto 5 day trip" etc.

Cheers!

[RyanPurkey]

I see. In my experience that is too small of a difference to create multiple pages for. I'd get better rankings driving links, reviews, and engagement around the one page with multiple day purchase options. For content marketing to work well it needs to be more differentiated per page. Cheers!

[Linda-Vassily]

I agree with Ryan, doing it all on one page with the different number of days/itineraries sectioned out is the way I'd go.

First, a page actually can rank well for more than one search term, especially when they are so closely related.

And second, what is the point of optimizing different pages for different numbers of days and then canonicalizing them to the ten day trip? The canonical indicates that only the ten-day page should be indexed, so who cares whether the shorter trip pages are optimized or not? They won't be findable in the SERPs.

Lastly, there is no penalty as such for duplicate content. Google just decides which page is the most useful to show and the others drop out of the index. If your pages are very similar, Google may well make the decision for you and drop some of them out of the index.