Thanks RFK.

I would not use the canonical in this way for two reasons.

1. It is the improper use of the canonical link.  Google may ignore the canonical directive when it is used improperly and actually gives a similar example on the webmaster blog of this being an incorrect use

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

"Remember that the canonical designation also implies the preferred display URL. Avoid adding a rel=canonical from a category or landing page to a featured article."

2. If you were to use the canonical in this way and Google follows it, you are eliminating all of your blog posts from the index.  This would result in lost traffic from long tail searches and ultimately less traffic to your site.

Just to add to redfishkings point - You can only canonical one page to another page.  You mention using a canonical link from a "category archive page to the individual posts" that will not work.

I help run a directory site and we have City pages with multiple listings.  We don't mark up that page but we have a landing page for each location.  The landing page for a location is what we markup that way.

If you look on sites like Yelp they do the same thing.

http://www.yelp.com/dallas

On the Dallas page there is no schema markup but

http://www.yelp.com/biz/eddie-vs-prime-seafood-dallas

If you visit a local restaurant then the schema markup shows up.

I was looking through the schema.org documentation

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Using the url property. Some web pages are about a specific item. For example, you may have a web page about a single person, which you could mark up using the Person item type. Other pages have a collection of items described on them. For example, your company site could have a page listing employees, with a link to a profile page for each person. For pages like this with a collection of items, you should mark up each item separately (in this case as a series of Persons) and add the url property to the link to the corresponding page for each item, like this:

 _[itemprop="url">Alice Jones](alice.html)

  [itemprop="url">Bob Smith](bob.html)_ 

So in the example on Schema, you can tag the location with the type and then use the URL parameter to point to the actual page that has the information.

I then looked at CitySearch I did see an example of this

http://dallas.citysearch.com/find/section/dallas/restaurants.html

and

http://dallas.citysearch.com/profile/34327220/lewisville_tx/mama_s_daughters_diner.html

If you look at the code on the Dallas Restaurant pages they use Item List markup

itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/ItemList">

That is a list of Breakfast Restaurants in Dallas and then for each place on that page they will mark up

itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness" itemprop="itemListElement">

and

itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemprop="aggregateRating">

and then they reference the URL to the location page (as suggested above in the schema.org documentation)

itemprop="url" class="slyLink fn url org" name="popular.breadwinnerscafebakery.1.businessName" id="graphicBrowse.1.1.name">

[Check with your developer, but it looks like if you define the list of locations first, the spiders can see that all of the locations are a part of that list (vs the page being dedicated to a single location) then when you have the link to the landing page for the location you can do the full markup.

Good luck!](http://dallas.citysearch.com/profile/41040743/dallas_tx/breadwinners_cafe_bakery.html)

Generally speaking, you don't want thin content.  Don't do it.  Take each of the 8 topics and write to the fullest.  You may be surprised how much you can write on a given topic (vs just 150 words). Hire out a freelance writer on oDesk to help if you need.  You may then want to have an overview page that talks about the 8 section and links to them so that people (and bots) can see how things are organized.

(offers napkin to EGOL to wipe up coffee spittle)