What is Keyword Cannibalization and How to Fix It?
How to diagnose competing URLs targeting identical queries and resolve internal keyword cannibalization.
Speakers: Okan Çakır
Content author
10 Aug 2017
Video Transcript
⏱ 2 min read• 320 wordsRead the full speech or switch languages
Video Transcript
⏱ 2 min read• 320 wordsRead the full speech or switch languages
Keyword cannibalization means you've got multiple pages targeting one keyword query. When that happens, search engines may not decide which page to show. They just can't pick a winner. Your click-through rate can drop. You can lose rankings. Your organic traffic gets split across different pages. That hurts your SEO visibility. So what do you do if this happens? Or better yet, how do you prevent it? First, let's say page A and page B are super similar. They're basically targeting the same keyword. Try consolidating everything into the stronger page. Set up a 301 redirect from the weak pages to the strong one. Then improve the content on the remaining page. Merging them like this solves the problem.
Now let's say the pages are totally different. They actually target different keywords. In that case, you need to differentiate them. Start by optimizing one page for a more long-tail keyword. Beyond that, tweak your title and meta description tags. That helps you explain the difference to the bots. Or let's say you have a filter page that's open to indexing. And it's competing with the main category page. Here, use a canonical tag. Point it at the category page you actually want indexed. There are other on-site fixes too. For example, you can tune how much value you pass to each page.
Run that value from short tail down to long tail. Do that, and the problem shrinks a lot. Say you push more value to "shoes" on your site. Then dial back what you give to long tail terms. Think "heeled shoes" or "red heeled shoes." Build your category structure around that. One last fix: your anchor text. This means the anchors in your internal links. Put each page's target keyword in the anchor text. Search engine bots then understand those pages better. They can tell the two apart in the SERPs. And you dodge the keyword cannibalization problem.
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