Keyword cannibalization means you have more than one page on your site that targets the same keyword—one page cannibalizes another’s ability to rank and neither perform as well as they should do. If you optimize the articles and posts of similar content or use the same keyword in both posts then they will eat away each other’s ability to rank. Google will show 1 or 2 results from the same domain in the search result. It can show up to 3 if you have a high authority domain.
Why is keyword cannibalization bad for SEO?
If you cannibalize your own keyword, it means you are competing with yourself for Google ranking. Let us consider that you have two posts and they have content. In this case Google can not distinguish which post should rank first for a certain search query. On the other hand, important factor link backlinks CTR will get diluted over several posts instead of one post. As a result they will both rank lower.
When you write the posts and focus not the exact keyword but if it is almost the same then in this case cannibalization also can occur. It will be hard for Google to figure out which article is most important and should rank first.
How to recognize keyword cannibalization for SEO?
It is easy to check your site for keyword cannibalization. You simply do the search for your site, for any certain keyword you think might have multiple results. As given below:
site:https://websitetoon.com/specific keywords
You can see in search results and suspect how many posts suffer from cannibalization.
There is one more simple way to find cannibalization. That is:
Site:domain name.com “keyword”
It will let you know if you are suffering from cannibalization or not. If two of your pages are ranking at position #1 and #2 that’s not a problem. But if they are on number #7 or #8 in search results then you need to worry about it and solve the problem.
How to solve SEO keyword cannibalization?
There are a few steps to solve this problem:
- Audit your content
- Analyze content performance
- Decide which one to keep
- Act: merge, delete and redirect
The first two steps will help you to decide which article to keep, which one to merge or delete. In many cases the acting part will consist of combining and deleting the articles but also improving the internal linking of your site.
Improve internal linking
You can help Google to figure out which article of your sites most important and should rank first by descent internal linking structure. You should link from the posts that are less important to you to the most that are important posts. In this way, It will become easy for Google to identify which post it should pop up highest in the search results.
Keyword cannibalization and online shops
If you have a shopping business it’s normal that you may have the product pages with similar keywords. In this type of site, the site structure is the most important factor. It is good practice to link every product back to the category page—the page you should optimize to rank. You should keep an eye on old product pages that could cannibalize the most significant pages. You should delete or redirect those pages to solve the issue of cannibalization.