Canonical link to similar content

[pdeg]

I run a website that posts discounts and and sales for select stores. I create a page for each discount or sale and eventually the offer expires, but I keep the page. When a new offer comes out (often identical) I create another new page, with same meta and 99% same content, with an incremental number added to the end of the url. This is resulting in a lot of duplicate content. The problem is with the current site structure I am not sure where to set the canonical link, or if it would help/harm my rankings. My site structure(as well as a few other routes) is:

/stores/
/discounts/
/sales/

Currently I could have for example:

/stores/store-name (only ever one store page per store. These pages do have links to a stores active codes and sales, as well as other information)
/discounts/store-name-discount-1 (can be many with dupe content)
/sales/store-name-sale-1 (can be many with dupe content)

I have noticed on bigger voucher sites, if they have a direct link to a voucher e.g '/voucher-codes/get-10-off-at-store-name' they set a canonical link back to the overview page of all vouchers for that store e.g.: '/voucher-codes/store-name'. As my site structure is a bit different, I am considering doing one of the following:

'/discounts/store-name-discount-1' -> '/stores/store-name'
'/sale/store-name-sale-1' -> '/stores/store-name'

the other option would be to set them to the index pages of each section which list all codes/sales:

'/discounts/store-name-discount-1' -> '/discounts'
'/sale/store-name-sale-1' -> '/sales'

I am leaning towards the first option, however I have read that the canonical linked page should have the same content, although the store page does list that stores offers, it has a lot of different content on as well... could this be an issue?

Any other suggestions on how to handled these expired/duplicate offers?

[vallam]

I guess the first method with canonical tags should work well

[pdeg]

Thanks for the reply, so you don't see it being a problem that the canonically linked pages don't strictly have the same content?

[vallam]

As far as I understand, you want to set canonical on every discount page pointing to the page with the list of discounts, that contains that discount. If I get it right, I think it should work. Especially if it's widely used by your competitors.

[Lishmalinyjames]

A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs.

[makoo]

When a site has duplicate content, Google chooses the canonical URL. Learn more about canonical URLs and how to consolidate duplicate URLs.