What Is Keyword Cannibalisation?

Date First Published: 9th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what keyword cannibalisation is in this article.

Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on the same website are optimised for the same keywords and compete against each other for ranking. This can lead to both pages causing issues for the organic performance of the website as the similar pages will split the organic click-through rate, link equity, and efforts across multiple pages and decrease the value of each page. Although keyword cannibalisation can happen to any site, it most commonly happens for sites with lots of auto-generated content and sites that quickly grow. For example, for websites that are quickly growing, it is easy to unintentionally write articles that end up very similar and use the same keywords.

As a result, this will confuse search engines as to which page to rank higher and they might give a higher ranking to a webpage that the website owner did not want to prioritise. Multiple pages targeting the same keyword, such as two posts about whether or not social media shares are a Google ranking factor, will also waste the crawl budget by allowing search engine bots to crawl multiple pages. There may also be duplicate content issues if the pages are identical or very similar to each other.

Checking whether a website is affected by keyword cannibalisation is easy. All you need to do is type 'site:website.com' 'keyword' and you will be able to tell whether it has multiple pages targeting the same keyword. It is also important to see which position the pages rank.

Difference Between Keyword Cannibalisation and Duplicate Content

Keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content are slightly different. Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on the same website target the same keywords and compete against each other for ranking. The pages may have different content, but they are optimised for the same keywords.

Duplicate content is a more identical type of content that will cause even more SEO issues because the content is very similar or identical to content that already exists on the World Wide Web. Duplicate content usually targets the same keywords and leads to keyword cannibalisation.

How To Avoid Keyword Cannibalisation?

Keyword cannibalisation can be avoided by the following methods:

Merging content

If a website owner has two or more pages that have similar content and target similar keywords, they should consider taking all of the content and merging it into a single page. Merging content will simplify and help with SEO. They can redirect the old content to the new content.

Removing keywords

If a website owner wants to keep some specific content in the SERPs and the presence of a certain keyword is unnecessary, they can consider removing that keyword. Targeting a different keyword that is still relevant to the page, but different from the original one will solve keyword cannibalisation issues.

Moving pages to a subdomain or another website

If the content is different, moving one of the pages to a subdomain or another website can solve keyword cannibalisation issues on the same website. The benefit is that two or more pages can rank for the same keywords, but the website owner will still need to focus on maintaining multiple pages.

Improving internal linking

Website owners can help Google determine which page is more important by setting up a decent internal linking structure. They should internally link to more important pages. That way, Google can figure out which one the owner of the website wants to rank higher in the search engines.

Deleting content

This method should only be used as a last resort if there are no other methods of solving keyword cannibalisation issues and the content is no longer relevant to a website. Obviously, if the content no longer exists, the problem doesn’t.

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