Keyword Cannibalization What It Really Is

Many people believe that having multiple pages about the same thing confuses search engines and leads them to rank the “wrong” page. In the words of Patrick Stox, this whole idea is “preposterous.” He’s right. Having multiple pages about the same thing can lead to unexpected or undesirable rankings, but it doesn’t always mean that something’s wrong or needs fixing. However, it can occasionally signal an opportunity to consolidate content to improve rankings and organic performance. Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on a website target the same or similar keywords and compete against each other to hurt the site’s organic performance.

 Let’s say we have

Two pages about technical SEO. If we could get more organic traffic overall by combining the two pages into one, that’s a cannibalization issue. The existence of those executive email list two pages is eating away at our organic performance. Is  is bad. But it’s crucial to remember that you only have a real cannibalization issue when multiple pages target the same keyword and hurt a site’s organic performance. But even if that’s true for traffic from this keyword, what if these pages each rank for hundreds of other keywords? In that case, why worry about traffic from just one keyword? The reality is that we don’t have a real cannibalization issue here because the existence of these two pages likely isn’t harming our site’s overall organic performance.

If we were to merge

Or delete one of them, we’d likely lose some of our other. Keyword rankings and see a net drop in traffic. Running a site: search can help you to find potential USA CEO cannibalization issues. The only issue is that the results lack a sense of place, making it hard to know how to tackle the issue. 

Which pages should be redirected, and which should they keep? Is this even likely to improve things? You can often find answers to these questions by running a regular. Google search and removing host clustering—which is. Where Google excludes similar pages from the same host from the search results. For example, if we search for “keyword cannibalization.” In Google, we only see one result from Moz in the top 20.