How to Tell Google About My Near Duplicate Pages?

[Dino64]

For my Adwords campaign, I create a separate landing page for each Ad Group, but are similar enough to one another that they may be considered duplicate content. Should I use a canonical tag on the page to tell Google which page is priority? I don't care about any of those pages ranking in search, I'm just using them for my ads. I also don't want to redirect, clearly. Is the canonical tag the correct way to go?

[ChrisAshton]

Canonicalization is a perfectly acceptable way to deal with this, particularly if you only have 3 or 4 of these pages.

On the other hand, if you have quite a few, I'd be more inclined to block them via Robots.txt to save some crawl budget.

For what you're looking to do here, the outcome is essentially the same, one just stops Google spending valuable resources crawling those pages unnecessarily.

For more info, there is some helpful discussion and further reading in this Q&A Post if you're interested.