Stuck with canonical URL - main site vs categorys?

[advertisingcloud]

Hello,

I started to doubt myself. We have a classified advertisements website. On the main www.website.com page, almost all the advertisements are shown. Now we take those advertisements and also split them into categorys

Category 1 / category 2 / category 3 / category 4

Now all those categories almost always have the same content as www.website.com except a bit less (because X amount of content is now divided also to 4-5 groups)

For raking should i actually tell google that those categories are a copy of www.website.com or they should still be as they are?

[GPainter]

Before you get in a muddle as your self this: Are the giving value? If they are service a purpose and their is a variation that does the same and users are finding them helpful why not! If they are just PPC landing pages with variations yes a canonical maybe helpful.  Mostly it will come do to how much value do they give to your user? Obviously there is an expectation and if they're are literally the same but (e.g.) with a different colour font then ignore this question!

There is a lot of duplicate content on the internet so it's not the worst problem to have, i hope that i've at least helped give a bit of relief!  All the best.