If you missed it, J. Turnbull moderated the informative #SEOchat on Twitter. These tweets are full with information, yet you may miss them since they appear and disappear so quickly. I tried to collect and cite all of those remarks. The topic this week is content cannibalization.
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Content cannibalization (AKA keyword cannibalization) is an SEO issue that can negatively affect the ranking of a website’s web pages. If you want to know more about keyword cannibalization, you’re reading the right post. Read on to discover how to identify and avoid this problem that can affect important metrics like Click Through Rate (CTR), organic traffic, and conversions.
In this post, you will also learn what keyword cannibalization is, examples of keyword cannibalization, the tools you need to identify cannibalization, and how to resolve the issue.
Before we start, watch this video to learn how to use Google Search Console to find and fix pages (from the same website) ranking for the same keyword.
What is keyword cannibalization?
I think the issue is anytime folks have 2 pages ranking oh no cannibal time but itβs more an issue when say a blog post outranks a product page on a transactional KW #seochat
Mordy Oberstein
A1 It’s when two pages are competing for the same keyword and knock each other down the list. So if you have a niche site, you are stuffed.
Simon Cox
It used to remind me of cannonballs! But clearly we’re not talking about this, this time around #SEOchat
Nicole Ponce
What is a classic example of keyword cannibalization on a website?
A2 it can happen a lot with large sites and sometimes with subdomains. I’ve seen third-party help desk apps repeat content from the main site and rank higher. #seochat
Crystal Carter (she/her)
A2: From the Google results side, two very similar page titles show up as separate results in the search engines. The pages may have the same content or be overly optimized for the same keyword.
Sweepsify
A2 had an issue a long time ago where our pdfs seriously outranked our main section pages!
Simon Cox
How can you see if you have keyword cannibalization on your site (or of your clients)?
A3 The Google search console should be able to show this to you. Filter by query and compare the pages. #SEOchat
Crystal Carter (she/her)
A3 with 1,005 clicks is better than none, though. But if we deindexed the 5 clicks page, would the other get 2000 clicks?
Simon Cox
What are the best tools to identify keyword cannibalization?
* cough* @semrush *cough* #SEOchat
Nicole Ponce
In their handy dandy Position Tracking tool! – https://semrush.com/news/position-tracking-cannibalization-shall-not-pass/β¦ #SEOchat
Nicole Ponce
What did you do to resolve this issue?
A5: After the SEO audit, content audit, figure out the content strategy practices that are resulting in the keyword cannibalization and resolve them. As someone else mentioned, make sure that your multiple content teams work together.
Sweepsify
In the PDF case, we just blocked them with Robots.txt at the time, but that was really the wrong thing to do. It kept some department heads happy though. In the long term, we built internal links to the section pages. Now though, I’d be testing till the cows come home.
Simon Cox
A5. I checked traffic and rankings to get some information before targeting a different keyword for one of the pages, rewrote the content to add keywords and it got resolved some time after that. #SEOChat
Montse Cano
How long does it take to get rid of keyword cannibalization (from the URL you were working on)?
A6 It’s taken a while, in my case, several weeks. The most important aspects were high traffic and a decent number of conversions, though.
Montse Cano
A6 I used to have several pieces of string in my pocket, always useful, and I never once measured them. I used the right bit of string at the right time. Same when fixing cannibalisation-depends on how focused it needs to be, 1 page or many, if 3rd parties are involved.
Simon Cox
How can we prevent keyword cannibalization for our websites and those of our clients?
Use a defined strategy, bearing in mind that some cannibalisation can be expected, especially in ecommerce. #SEOChat
Montse Cano
A7 You want to be generating good content on a regular basis, probably, and you can’t easily predict whats going to cannibalise what. However if you are keeping your main content evergreen and have a good overview of it all then you will probably avoid it anyway.
Simon Cox
A7: MAKE A PLAN – and then follow that plan! #SEOChat
Kathryn Lang – hopesmith and dream ignit
I sincerely hope this overview was useful. You can find it here if you missed last week’s #SEOchat.