Duplicate content and canonical URLs

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael D. Ross: Hello, this is Susan Ross again. ; I have a question about duplicate content and canonical URLs. ; Thanks to your advice I now have one website for my husband's legal practice with two locations. ; I created a separate page for each of the two cities. ; He is offering the same exact service in both cities. ; I currently have about 90% unique content on each of those pages. ; I am wondering if the unique content strategy is the way to go or if I could/should just duplicate the pages and implement canonical URLs. ; This is what I would prefer to do. ; But which is better for SEO? ; The unique content is difficult to produce. ; And in order for the pages to be that unique I have to leave out things on each page that I would prefer to have on both.
• 
  Kevin Carney: From an SEO perspective, cananical URLs provide no benefit.
  
  Again, from an SEO perspective, unique content on one site serving 2 offices is the best bang for your buck.
  
  Creating good original content for 2 sites is much more than twice as much work, as 2 websites need to be "wound up" so to speak.
  
• 
  Jim Munro: I don't think duplicate content is anything to be afraid of. It's not a penalty, it's just a filter to counteract "domain crowding", ie the same website appearing multiple times in the same search result.
  
  I would not be afraid of having some identical content on these two pages whatsoever but there is also an opportunity to build on what makes them unique.
  
  I think Kevin is right. I would not canonicalise one of the two pages to the other.
• 
  Suraj Gadage: I agree with +Jim Munro ;having some identical content won't be a big deal. We used to have a client who provides beauty education in 60 cities of US. Now in all cities they offer the same programs and have the same program specific content (50-100 words) along with the city page content being used across all 60 cities pages.
• 
  Federico Sasso: Please avoid canonicalizing, it would make one of the two (the non-canonical one) disappear from the SERP
• 
  Ryan Cramer: If you are talking about two PAGES with 90% unique content, that's not enough to be considered duplicate content or run the risk of one being not indexed because of the use of the canonical tag. However, if you are considering two domains - one for each location - another strategy could be offered.
  
• 
  Peter Macinkovic: What is the nature of the content being reused?
  
  If they are competing for the same terms, then you would be better to pick a 'winner' so that the target URL can be more competitive for those target terms and can be seen as a 'home base' of sorts for that piece of content.
  
  But if those pages are are targeting geographic or niche specific variations on that content, then having duplicated is fine as long as their is some tangible, contextual point of differentiation between the two pages.
  
  This is basically a strategic decision in whether you want those pages to rank for the same search visibility.
  
  
  
• 
  Michael D. Ross: +Peter Macinkovic ; The reused content would be stuff like the number of years he has been in practice, the types of cases he handles, and just things we have written and really honed that we like the wording of and make good points about our business and why people should choose it. ; The only actual, literal difference between the two are their addresses. ; But we can make the decision to one the winner simply because one page/city is where we live and the other we have to travel 2 hours to get to.