Imagine having two boxers in the ring with identical skills, styles, and speed. While they might both prepare for the fight, their equal boxing skills would likely result in a confusing boxing match, confounding the audience about which boxer won.
Replace our boxers with two duplicate web pages and the audience with search engines, and you have an analogy of how content cannibalization (also called keyword cannibalization) harms your search engine optimization.
In this post, we’re walking you through everything you need to learn about content cannibalization: what it is, how it happens, and the best SEO strategies to avoid cannibalization issues from ruining your SERP performance.
Table of Contents
What Is Content or Keyword Cannibalization?
Content cannibalization is a technical SEO issue when a website has blogs, articles, or posts that can rank for the same search query in Google. Either because the site’s owners deliberately optimized them for identical search intent or the topic they cover is too similar.
Two pages in one website targeting “best SEO practices” for keywords would be an example of content cannibalization.
See, multiple pages in the same domain compete when they have matching target keywords or topics. This overlap will confuse search engines, unsure which page to prioritize when the user types the search query, ultimately hurting your page ranking.
Cannibalized keywords on your website mean you’ll never rank for anything. You’re practically vying with yourself for search rankings (hence, cannibal), which can be frustrating if you’ve already spent thousands of dollars on website design and content creation.
What Causes Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?
But what causes keyword cannibalization in the first place? Here are some of the most common culprits and factors that cause this hitch.
Unintended Cannibalization
Cannibalization often happens not because of carelessness but because some websites produce massive volumes of blog articles. When you constantly create content, say two articles for one day, overlapping topics are bound to happen.
Reviewing your existing content should be protocol when doing keyword research or creating new content, such as articles or social media posts, to prevent having similar pages.
Adopting traditional keyword search methods for your content marketing can be problematic, too. That is, compiling a list of keywords for the same search intent and making pages for each search term variation.
For example, writing two blog posts for topics about “SEO link building” and “SEO link building strategies.” While that might sound like a great idea for covering a wider range of search terms, it risks redundancy in content and, thus, cannibalization.
Improper On-Page Internal Linking
Problematic internal linking is another typical cause of cannibalization in websites. While link building within your website can help boost page authority, it’ll have the opposite effect if you cannibalize your content.
For example, if your target keyword is “SEO malpractices,” the internal links in other pages pointing to the blog post about SEO malpractices should use a relevant or exact phrase as the anchor text.
However, taking an exact phrase as an anchor text and using it to point to different pages can also be a potential cannibalization issue. It causes search engines to struggle to determine which pages have more authority, compromising both pages’ ranking positions.
So, instead of a single page ranking well in SERP, you’ll get multiple pages ranking poorly or moderately.
Website Canonicalization Problem
Canonicalization is choosing which page is “primary” when indexing your website. Simply put, it tells the search engine which copy of the URL takes priority for ranking purposes.
You can do this by adding a canonical tag to the HTTP header. This tag will then serve as a signpost, pointing Google to your preferred page for a specific keyword that appears in the search results.
Adding canonical tags prevents problems caused by duplicate or similar content with different URLs. Forgetting to add canonical tags or deliberately neglecting to do so may be the culprit causing your pages to compete with each other.
What Happens When You Have Cannibalized Content?
Too much similar content can hurt your site’s SEO strategy. The worst case is that many content creators are unaware of the harm of using similar keywords to their metrics and conversions.
Dilutes Backlink and Anchor Texts
One of the worst effects of keyword cannibalization is it dilutes your backlinks’ authority. As you know, backlinks serve as recommendations from other websites, which Google uses when ranking your website.
More backlinks or inbound links translate to higher SERP rankings.
However, when you have multiple pieces of content for the same topic or keyword, the power of backlinks gets diluted. Instead of pointing to a single, high-authority page, the backlinks are split between the duplicate contents and don’t perform as well.
Remember, you want as many backlinks as possible for a page to scale Google ranks. Getting 20 backlinks for a single page is more useful for your SEO efforts than having 10 backlinks for multiple mediocre-ranked blog posts.
Reduces Page and Website Authority
The goal is to boost every page’s click-through rate (CTR) and improve their authority. To achieve this, you want every page to meet the users’ search intent and offer value by using distinctive keywords.
You can think of your website as a library. You don’t want your readers to find only chunks and incomplete pieces of information about an important topic across several books scattered all over the place.
If a single book (blog post) can present all the necessary details, that would be best for the reader’s time (user experience).
Cannibalized content compromises your page and website’s authority as it redirects users to multiple pages with little value to offer. It keeps your content from being the perfect match for queries and provides information that only “kind of” meets the user’s needs.
Wastes Google Crawl Budget
If you don’t already know, Google crawl bots don’t work 24/7 indexing your website.
Depending on the page or domain, Google can refresh an index every four to 30 days. Plus, it’s done on a page-by-page basis and not a whole website’s content in one go.
Cannibalizing keywords means Google visits two pages with practically identical content. That means you’re wasting one crawl budget that should’ve gone to more authoritative pages on your website!
How to Identify Cannibalized Content In Your Website?
Are you suspecting content cannibalization of ruining your SERP ranks? Use the following methods to determine and find these problematic URLs.
Content Auditing
A content audit is a process of analyzing and cataloging a website’s existing content. Most people use it to measure page performance, but you can also do an audit to locate keyword cannibalization problems.
For small websites, an easy way to determine content redundancy is to make a spreadsheet listing every page URL. If you notice repeated keywords throughout several URLs, they may be causing your duplication issues.
Running a Site Search
Running a site search is another excellent method to identify and eliminate recurring content in your website. You can do this by heading to Google and typing site:yourwebsite.com “topic”.
For example, a site search for Wikipedia would appear as site: wikipedia.org “search engine optimization”
Google will then show every page on your website that resembles the topic input. It lets you easily locate pages or keywords you suspect are repeating.
Do note that Google will return everything that vaguely matches the query. However, it doesn’t always mean all pages displayed are problematic.
Using Google Search Console
You can also do a thorough URL analysis and account for search intent using Google Search Console.
Your search console lists keywords and queries that yielded clicks on your site’s links. If you select one of the keywords and navigate to the pages tab, the console will display the URLs that got clicks for the search term you chose.
You’ll find duplicate or cannibalized content this way and take the necessary steps to stop them from ruining your SEO.
How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Fixing recurring content typically means restructuring your website. Severe cannibalization problems may also require a new landing page or 301 redirects to maintain rankings while changing URLs from one to another.
Another solution is remaking your most authoritative page into a landing page. From there, you’ll provide links to other pages offering detailed information about the user’s search query.
Of course, prevention is always the best cure, even in your SEO problems. To prevent content cannibalization on your web pages and keep your rankings from dipping, avoid publishing pages covering the same keywords or satisfying similar search intent.
Always check your website’s existing content before creating another. You can also invest in reliable auditing tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz for superior and easier content auditing.
Final Thoughts
To recap:
Keyword cannibalization is an issue where two or more of your website’s pages target similar keywords or answer the same search intent. Left alone, it can hurt your site’s SEO performance and lower your page’s ranking and authority.
Faulty internal linking, unintended duplication, and neglecting canonicalization can cause keyword cannibalization between pages. Frequent content auditing, site search, and tools like Google Search Console can help address pages eating each other’s rankings.
Keep these in your notes when implementing SEO strategies!
Published on: 2024-07-15
Updated on: 2024-07-15
