Canonical tags: do they mean more or less content to index when used in combination?

Say I've got a multipage presentation -- a 3 page tour, for example. Each page discribes a discreet part of the who开发者_如何学运维le set. There is a landing page, which links to these sequential parts. These parts link back to the landing page.

In this situation, is it best to have all pages point their canonical to the landing page or will that mean indexers like Google will ignore the content on those pages? Ideally, you'd Google into the landing page, which would help the user navigate through the subpages.

The landing page, three parts of the presentation are four different pages with different content. As such, their canonical URLs should be different. Canonical URLs should be the same only if the pages are either identical or have very few differences.

To specify relative rank of pages (e.g. to give higher rank to the landing page) you can use sitemaps.

By the way, you should also consider adding Next/Prev links to your presentation. I think it is more convenient to navigate presentation this way than going back to index every time. To give more information about the content, you can use hints like "Next (Part 2 Title)".