SEO cannibalization: What it is, how to detect it and how to avoid it

In the world of SEO, it's very common to hear about SEO cannibalization. It's a common problem that can negatively affect your website's ranking in search results.

To prevent it from happening to you, this article will shed light on the crucial elements of this problem. It will also provide information on detection techniques and feasible solutions if your website already suffers from it.

Index

What is SEO cannibalization?

How does SEO cannibalization affect your website?

How to detect SEO cannibalization on your website?

What to do in case of SEO cannibalization?

How to resolve SEO cannibalization?

How to avoid SEO cannibalization?

Case studies on SEO cannibalization

Conclusion

What is SEO cannibalization?

SEO cannibalization occurs when two or more pages of the same website compete with each other for the positioning of the same keyword or keyword phrase with different content.

This creates confusion for search engines because they don't know which page to rank in the first result for the user and dilutes the page's authority on that topic.

For example, imagine that you have two pages on your website that deal with the same topic, such as”women's shoes”.

Both pages contain similar information about different types of women's shoes, but they use the same main keyword in their titles, meta descriptions, and content.

In this scenario, SEO cannibalization occurs because both pages are competing with each other for the same ranking in the search results for the keyword”women's shoes”.

To prevent this phenomenon, maximize the ranking potential of keywords by focusing your positioning efforts on a single piece of content adapted to each specific keyword.

How does SEO cannibalization affect your website?

SEO cannibalization can have a negative impact on your website in several ways:

Confusion for search engines

Search engines like Google don't know which of the pages on your website are the most relevant to the target keyword.

This can make it difficult for them to determine which page should rank higher in search results.

Decrease in ranking

As a result of search engine confusion, all cannibalized pages are likely to rank lower for the target keyword than they could if they didn't compete with each other.

Loss of traffic

By having several pages with similar content, the traffic you could be receiving is diluted in a single page with more complete and relevant content.

Also, it could have another negative impact, which would be a Get out of organic clicks for not showing up in the first results in the SERP.

Lowering the authority of the pages

By competing with each other for the same keywords and having traffic distributed across several pages, the authority of the most important pages could be diluted.

This could lead to a drop in search engine rankings.

Decreased conversion rate

If users arrive at a page that is not the most relevant to their query, it can affect their experience they are more likely to leave the website without taking any action.

In this case, you could lose valuable actions for your business, such as buying a product or subscribing to an email list.

How to detect SEO cannibalization on your website?

If you are the owner of the project and are familiar with all the content published on it, you should find it quite simple.

However, if you're joining an ongoing project that you have little knowledge of or it's been a long time since you worked on it and you've gotten a little lost track of it, there are several ways to approach it.

This way, you can evaluate the relevance of your website's content and find out if each page has a unique purpose or if they are about the same topic.

Detect duplicate content

To detect SEO cannibalization, start by reviewing your content and make sure you're not using the same keywords on multiple pages.

Here's what steps you could take.

Manual analysis

The easiest and most affordable step to detect SEO cannibalization is to perform a manual analysis of your website.

Look for pages with similar titles and meta descriptions and analyze the similarities of their content.

Use the search function integrated in the CMS

Access the blog, for example, if it's a WordPress, and search for a specific keyword to see how many contents match it.

Use the “site:” command

An alternative to detect cases of cannibalization is to search directly on Google.

This is achieved using the “site:” command followed by the domain we want to research and the keyword we want to analyze.

There are other ways to detect this problem: using the internal search engine of the blog in question (if we don't own or have access to the CMS).

Identify cases of cannibalization using Google Search Console

Another easy way to get clues about cannibalization is through Google Search Console.

By accessing the performance of the search results and filtering by a specific query, we can see the pages that have ranked for that query.

Pay attention to the CTR, impressions, and positions on each page. If multiple pages are competing for the same keyword with similar metrics, cannibalization is possible.

Use other SEO tools

If you use SEO tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can get all the keywords for which the project is ranking. You can check if there is more than one result by ranking for the same keywords.

Also, the tool Screaming Frog provides an effective analysis of the content of your website to detect duplicate content.

Review website metrics

Then, it's recommended to examine your website's metrics.

If you notice that some of your pages are underperforming in terms of traffic or ranking, it could be an indication of SEO cannibalization.

Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console can provide you with valuable data about page performance.

Check the structure of internal links

If several pages are linked together with the same keywords, you could be causing confusion for both search engines and users.

Make sure that internal links are clear and logically organized.

What to do in case of SEO cannibalization?

Once you've identified this keyword cannibalization, it's crucial that you take action if you want to avoid a decline in your page's performance.

First you have to decide: To which URL to assign the keyword that is undergoing cannibalization to consolidate all the related content into it and begin to position it?

Once you've made that decision, you'll need to collect all the useful information that's scattered across other URLs and rewrite it to strengthen it.

To make this decision, you can look at several factors, such as:

• Which URL gets the most hits?
• Which one has a lower bounce rate?
• Which one generates the most conversions (if any)?

In short, the usual thing is to select the URL that is already well positioned so as not to lose the progress achieved, if you are interested in keeping it.

You might be surprised with the results, and it won't always be for the better.

It wouldn't be the first time that a blog article has a better ranking than a landing page, when you want the latter to occupy a prominent position, since that's where conversions are made, such as subscriptions, sales, reservations, etc.

How to resolve SEO cannibalization?

Once we have delimited the training possibilities of this post, let's proceed to analyze some solutions and the actions to take to resolve SEO cannibalization.

First of all, it is crucial to carry out a comprehensive keyword analysis and determine what strategy to follow with them.

It's important to remember that websites are often constantly updated with new content, so you should be very aware of how you use keywords.

To address the solutions, let's take the example that there are two blog articles called 2 and 3. Both are competing with 1 other blog article for a specific keyword.

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Combining and consolidating content

If you have two or more pages with content that can be combined. Here would be the steps to follow:

1. Select the URL that will be your main option. (1)

2. Use existing content scattered across several pages (in this case, blog articles 2 and 3) and merge it into a single page 1. This will make it as informative and robust as possible in terms of content and On-Page optimization.

Eliminate duplicate content

Once the content of pages 2 and 3 are reused, one of the options would be to delete these pages.

The next step is to create a 301 redirect to the main page to improve the user experience, indicate the change to search engines and consolidate the authority of your pages.

To maintain the authority of deleted pages, it could also be inherited from their quality backlinks. The best way to do that is to contact the webmasters of the pages linked to your pages and ask them to link them to your main page.

The latter is quite delicate, so we are going to offer other options.

Reuse URLs instead of creating new ones

You should also consider the type of content you usually publish on your website and how to manage it to avoid SEO cannibalization.

For example, if you have a travel website and events are repeated annually, it doesn't make sense to create a new blog article every year announcing those offers, such as “carnival-2023", “carnival-2024", etc. It's better to have a page with the URL “carnival” and update your content every year.

On the other hand, if you want to announce events or other activities that are repeated periodically, it is better to promote new editions using other tools such as social networks or the newsletter.

Adapt the content

An additional alternative, if you don't want to delete some URLs, is to adjust their content for a new keyword.

For that, you'll need to do a keyword analysis and find the most appropriate one.

Use long tail keywords

One strategy you can implement is to categorize your content using long-tail keywords.

For example, if you have a trendy e-commerce website, words like “shirt” are likely to be repeated frequently.

You can play with keywords such as “shirt with long sleeves”, “shirt for weddings”, “summer shirt”, etc., to avoid cannibalizing keywords in different URLs.

If you're in a very specific niche with a limited set of related keywords, you should consider how to organize your content.

Remember that create carefully crafted content A few pages can give you a better ranking than content on several pages that respond to the same search intent and end up cannibalizing each other.

How to avoid SEO cannibalization?

Since you've identified SEO cannibalization issues, you can focus on how to avoid them in the future.

As you follow, you propose some strategies.

Create 301 redirects

This option is the most recommended.

Once the content of 2 and 3 are redistributed and we must take advantage of the authority that these URLs have been able to obtain to boost the main page, 1.

Here we refer to all the links, social signals and user responses that should be transferred to the internal page that we have decided to focus on.

Benefits of 301 redirects

301 redirection is the most effective way to transfer authority directly.

This way we avoid creating 404 links, both internal (the internal links that we could have placed to those pages) and external (backlinks that the posts have obtained or links from the same search engine, if these pages were indexed).

Until Google updates its index, if 2 and 3 continue to rank (even for some long-tail keywords), the traffic they receive will go directly to content 1.

Thus, page 1 can begin to receive new response signals from users.

Drawbacks of 301 redirects

Pages not selected for ranking disappear completely, which can be problematic for a variety of reasons.

For example, if we move two posts to a page and those posts had a lot of valuable comments, we'll lose the format of comments and replies.

However, they could be copied as content.

It's also not recommended to saturate a website with 301 redirects.

Every time a redirect is executed, the server must access one site and automatically take it to another.

This can increase the load time of the page in question.

In addition, it has been proven that Google stops following redirects after a certain amount.

In fact, it is recommended to trace the links to the “old” pages (2 and 3) and modify them manually to the URL we want to focus on (1).

However, in some cases this may not be possible due to volume or other limitations.

In this sense, we would not penalize “other” pages in the rankings, we would simply remove them from them in favor of the content in which we really want to position ourselves.

Implement the canonical tag

Canonical links are tags that act as a suggestion to Google, indicating that, although we allow the indexing of a certain content, the content that is really relevant to that keyword is something else.

In our case, we could apply the canonical tag to content 2 and 3, pointing to 1 as the relevant page.

Before taking this action, the following should be taken into consideration:

Disadvantages of the canonical label

The use of the canonical attribute does not transfer authority from one page to the other.

Posts that will not be used to obtain ranking will be considered by Google as “secondary content”, which will probably result in the loss of their ranking.

However, the authority they have accumulated while online will not be used to improve the PageRank of our page 1.

Google interprets the canonical attribute “as a suggestion”, implying that it won't necessarily stop indexing old results.

In general, the canonical attribute tends to be more of a solution for problems such as duplicate content or “thin” content, rather than for keyword cannibalization problems.

Advantages of the canonical label

On the other hand, the content of 2 and 3 does not disappear and will continue to be accessible to users.

We can duplicate 2-3-in-1 content without worrying about internal duplicate content.

For example, we could keep the blog post with your comments and also copy them as quality content on page 1.

Incorporate the “noindex” tag

Another alternative is to apply the “noindex” tag to URLs where keywords that you want to position with other content are repeated.

This way, search engines will ignore them and won't show them in search results.

This solution is especially useful for e-commerce businesses, who can turn off the indexing of product pages to position categories directly.

Use the right link building

Finally, make sure you make proper use of the Link building, both internal and external.

This will help both Google and users to clearly identify what is important content on your website and what URLs are ranking for certain keywords.

In addition, this will help eliminate any ambiguity in the content.

It is crucial to avoid confusing the user, since the same set of keywords with different content can lead them to not know exactly at what URL they will find the information they are looking for.

If this happens, the user's decision will be simple: move on to the next result and not click on your website.

Designing an effective sitemap

An effective sitemap can be a useful tool for preventing SEO cannibalization.

It allows search engines to understand the structure of your website and find all your pages.

Therefore, we recommend that you keep your sitemap up to date and that all your pages are linked correctly.

Case studies on SEO cannibalization

The following case studies are examples of good practices to support the arguments in our article.

They also provide a clearer view of their impact on a website's performance.

Case Study #1: Reorganizing Content

One of our customers has service pages and blog articles related to these services.

To avoid cannibalization of these pages and for Google to offer the appropriate page for user queries, restructure the content of the service pages.

After a detailed analysis, we found that the problem lay in the frequent repetition of similar keywords both on the service page and on the blog.

To address this situation, we reorganized the content of the service page and fine-tuned the keywords so that the post focuses on unique terms.

The results were very positive as service pages began to rank for keywords specifically related to services. Also, inquiries related to these services increased in clicks.

Case Study #2: Removing Repeated Content

Another client had several cases of cannibalization because of a significant number of blog articles dealing with the same topics or with duplicate content.

To solve that, we first did an analysis of the pages generating more organic traffic and with better content quality.

The next step was to eliminate low-quality pages, add a 301 redirect to the main pages, and improve the content with more detailed and updated information.

These steps led to an improvement in the positioning of the pages and, as a consequence, an increase in organic traffic.

Conclusion: control every aspect of your website and avoid cannibalization

To avoid SEO cannibalization problems and not be penalized in rankings, it is crucial to consider the implementation of an appropriate web architecture.

To avoid this, it is recommended to control the contents of each page and the search intentions that you want to satisfy on each of them.

Also, by conducting regular reviews to detect possible cases of SEO cannibalization and resolve problems in time, it can facilitate the implementation of solutions more efficiently.

All of this can help us prevent this type of problem in the future.

If you have multiple URLs competing for the same keywords, you know what actions to take to improve your website's ranking.

It's important to identify and fix SEO cannibalization on your website to improve your ranking and increase traffic. So don't wait any longer to implement them.

In the case that you can't handle this task, it's It is essential that you look for SEO professionals to manage your cannibalization problems or to avoid them by creating a content strategy for your website, you can count on our SEO team.

Their experience in various sectors of activity and their competence will help you to carry out a good content strategy avoiding SEO cannibalization.

For more information, contact us and we'll explain our on-page SEO services to you in detail.

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