Find out what keyword cannibalization is, how to prevent it, and what to do if you notice it on your company's website.
Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on your website compete for the same keyword; that is, when they have similar or duplicate content that deals with the same topic. This can negatively affect your website's SEO ranking , as it can cause confusion for both users and search engines.
Some people make this mistake due to ignorance or lack of an adequate SEO strategy. It may seem logical to think that the more pages you have optimized for the same keyword, the more likely you are to appear in the first results on Google. However, this is not the case. On the contrary, it is a practice that can have negative consequences for your website, such as:
Spread traffic across multiple pages instead of concentrating it on just one.
Make it difficult for each page to gain authority and relevance by competing with each other.
Reduce opportunities for external links and conversions.
Confusing Google about which URL is most important for a given query.
The best way to avoid keyword cannibalization is, therefore, to design a china phone number content strategy that contemplates the use of different keywords, without overlapping, and that allows for easy control of the texts that are being generated.
If this was not done from the beginning, you can use tools such as Google Search Console or Semrush to analyze the keywords for which your pages are positioned and detect possible matches or similarities. Once you have identified the URLs that use the same keyword, there are several possible solutions.
On the one hand, you can use rel=canonical tags to tell Google which URL to prioritize. This is useful when entries have very similar or duplicate content and you don't want to remove any of them. The rel=canonical tag tells Google to consider one page as the original and ignore the others as copies.
Another option is to leave only the URL with the most traffic and delete the rest if they do not provide value to the user or the business. This is the most drastic solution, but also the most effective when the pages are irrelevant or of low quality. It involves eliminating the pages that cannibalize the keyword and redirecting traffic to another URL that has more visits and better performance.
You can also modify the keywords so that they are different and better fit the user's intention and the content of each page. This option is most recommended when the entries have quality content that is different but related to the same topic. It is about optimizing the keywords so that they are more specific and in line with what each page offers, thus avoiding competing for the same generic term.