Editorial Staff
Imagine that there are five face cleaner in front of you.
They have each features similar to each other.
From the ingredients, packaging, and size. And now, you’ve been asked to choose one of them.
Confused of which one to choose?
This scenario is the illustration when your site has multiple pages that consists the same thing, and it confused the search engine to choose which pages to rank higher.
This situation is what we called as Keyword Cannibalization in SEO.
In this module, you’ll learn:
- What is keyword cannibalization
- Why keyword cannibalization is bad for SEO
- How to identify keyword cannibalization in your site
- How to fix keyword cannibalization
What is Keyword Cannibalization?
Keyword cannibalization is when a site has multiple pages that rank for the same queries in the search engine and competing against each other.
It might because the topic on both pages is too similar or you accidentally optimized them for the same key phrase.
You might created both pages in different writing styles, but their content is related closely to each other.
This is a keyword cannibalization issue.
Why Keyword Cannibalization is Bad for SEO?
Google are able to show more than 1 result from the same page.
Normally, it will show 1 or 2 for the same site, or even 3 if your site has high authority.
You might ask this question, why not dominate the SERP by putting our site in the first and second position for each of the search query?
That sounds a good idea, but in fact, combining both pages into one page is far more beneficial rather than splitting into two pages and aiming to dominate the first and second position on SERP.
Let’s see it from the technical perspective:
For example, now you have 2 pages that managed to take the first and second position on SERP.
The first page obtained 500 organic backlinks while your second page obtained 200 organic backlinks over the time.
When your competitor see this, they just need to get more than 500 backlinks to beat your first and second page, assuming the other metrics are the same.
Imagine that if you combine 2 of the pages into one, you could have 700 organic backlinks in total, and it is much harder for your competitor to beat it.
Besides, the other metrics such as CTR and bounce rate are also counted separately if you split into two pages.
In conclusion, it much better for you to combine both pages into one and focus on one.
The worse case, the search engine could rank both pages lower due to this diluted metrics separation, and your competitor can easily outrank your site.
How to Identify Keyword Cannibalization?
Keyword cannibalization could happen accidentally without you knowing it and with you don’t want it from the beginning.
For example, lets say you created a content about “how to get rid of bad mood” in 2018.
In 2020, you created an identical content “bad mood solution tips”, which you forgotten that you’ve already created the similar one 2 years back.
To identify, you can simply type in Google in this form: site:domain.com +”keyword”.
From there, you’ll get a list of result and you can see if you have created a topic that are closely similar.
Other way, you can do a content audit by sorting the topic titles and check out if you’ve accidentally written a similar topic.
Fix Keyword Cannibalization
There is none of good things comes from maintaining keyword cannibalization.
Once you discovered that you have keyword cannibalization issue, right away fix it!
However, the solution is not just as simple as deleting one of the pages.
In fact, this will make it worse as you’ll lose all the organic backlinks and traffic from that deleted page.
The solution to fix keyword cannibalization is:
- Decide which page you want to maintain and which page you want to remove.
- Once you decided, move all the content you had in the page that you want to remove to the existing one.
- Delete the page you want to remove, and redirect it to the other page that consist combined content.
However, you will only learn about redirect later on in the future module in our course!
Final Thoughts
To rank higher in SERP, the real opponent that you should face is your competitor.
You shouldn’t compete against yourself in the SERP as it will only give more harm than good.
