What Is Keyword Cannibalization and How To Fix It

The key to bringing in more new visitors is your SEO – you make it easier for search engines to associate your content with search queries. This determines how likely they are to see your website pages as a result of their query. There’s a lot to be said even about the basics of SEO. In fact, optimizing websites for search engines is a job in itself. However, we think there are things that every WordPress user, or indeed every website administrator, should know. making the most of good SEO practicesand keyword cannibalization it’s one of those things.

Keyword cannibalism is one of the few possible reasons why your posts may not appear in search results, no matter which search engine your potential visitors use. But what exactly is keyword cannibalization? Is there any way to fix or prevent this? This is exactly what we will discuss in this article. If you’re sure you know everything you need to know about what keyword cannibalism is, don’t hesitate to go to the appropriate section. And if you’re just starting out creating your content, be sure to check out our section on how to avoid cannibalism in the first place – it’s, unsurprisingly, much easier than fixing it.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Simply put, the keyword cannibalization is the current situation. multiple results from the same domain compete with each other. But why is this happening?

A search engine will usually show one to two results from the same domain. A website usually deals with similar topics. So you may have invested a lot of research and hard work into your content, but only if Multiple pages or articles optimized for the same or similar keyword or keywords Search. When this happens, a search engine won’t know how to distinguish between then and which one will rank better.

This predictably leads to problems with your search engine optimization. irrigatedand results from your domain will likely rank lower than they would otherwise.

How Is Keyword Cannibalization Determined?

It is not so difficult to determine whether cannibalism exists: simply use a search engine to search for your content and take a look at the results. If you’re optimizing for Google, you can use the site: operator to make sure you only get results from your website. In fact, there are several Google search operators that may be useful to you when trying to detect cannibalism.

Now, if a keyword or set of keywords gives you multiple results from your websitethese are the possibilities the pages are tearing apart. There is a popular saying that nothing is as invisible as the second page of Google results. If you want to see if your pages show up in people’s searches, you can try using the private browsing mode. If two or more of your pages are at the top of the results list, it’s fine. If they rank low on the first page, or worse, rank on the second or subsequent pages, it could be because of cannibalism and you might want to invest in fixing it.

If you are running an audit or just want to check for cannibalism on all your keywords, the following post is helpful define keyword cannibalism on scale. It has a free spreadsheet tool that you can use to find all the keywords you might be exposed to cannibalism.

Where Can Keyword Cannibalization Occur?

Reasons why your pages are competing with each other, contents himself or yours metadata. Understanding the difference is important because this will affect how you should fix it.

Let’s discuss your topic first. contents. If you have multiple articles covering the same topic or event, or have similar product posts, they are likely to compete with each other for the attention of your visitors and most importantly search engines. Any major intervention in your content aimed at fixing cannibalism will normally take more time than avoiding keyword cannibalism, so it’s best to prevent it or detect it early.

your pages metadata This is the problem. This refers to headlines, captions, and any other data that doesn’t make up the main body of your content. This type of cannibalization would probably be less difficult to fix.

How To Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

It mainly depends on where your problem really is.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalism Caused by Website Content

if your contents If cannibalism is the cause, you’ll need to do some planning. This often comes up with opinion pieces, analysis, or posts about things that happen periodically, wherever you can expect a significant amount of overlap.

In that case, you should probably ask yourself if you need to fix cannibalism. Your content isn’t boring or repetitive because you approach a topic from different angles – quite the opposite. But if you think some of your content is unnecessary, there are things you can do to prevent your pages from being cannibalized.

One solution is to set up a 301 redirect. Simply choose the page with less traffic and direct all its traffic to more domains. A 301 redirect means that one of your pages will no longer be accessible.

If you want both pages to continue, set a canonical tag one of your pages is on the other, making a page “master copy” in the eyes of the search engine. This will stop cannibalism, but both pages will continue to exist.

Finally, you can combine your content. If there’s a significant amount of conflict, you can clear that up and instead use internal links to direct your visitors to another related post. Also, if you think an old post could use expansion or rearrangement, you can consolidate your posts to cover all the relevant points in one place.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization Caused by Metadata?

If your problem metadatameans that some or all of your metadata is the same or similar for at least two of your posts: titles, subheadings, descriptions, and the like.

This is typical of ecommerce websites – after all, there are too many words you can use to describe a T-shirt, and ecommerce product pages tend to have very little other content as well. It shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

You can fix this by using your category pages correctly. simply use general terms for root pages Goes into more detail when needed. With a little effort, you can make good use of your classifications and greatly improve your SEO. You should also change the meta descriptions and even the titles if you think they’re too similar, so that a query submitter can differentiate between your pages, even if they both appear in the same search.

In any case, you can and should always test your content after making changes and see if your changes make an improvement.

How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

This is the part that involves planning ahead.

First, before creating content, check if you have covered the same issue before. If that’s the case, there are a few things you can do to avoid cannibalism. If the old page is old, you can delete it and start from a clean page. But this may mean broken links if some other pages link and you can use referral traffic. It’s probably better to set up a 301 redirect as we discussed earlier and have all the old links referencing your new content.

Second, if you have an old page that might break the new one, fine-tune metadata of the old page or the planned metadata for the new one to prevent cannibalization.

Finally, check and recheck. Whatever change you make, you may be unintentionally making things worse rather than better. Research your keywords before planning your content and see if you cause unintentional cannibalism after publishing. If you need to revert to the previous state of your website, it is much better to do so early enough that you can detect a problem.

As a result

Keyword cannibalism is not something people often think about when developing websites and learning how to plan their content; this leads to traffic losses due to problems that could have been avoided with a little advance planning. And even if it does happen, it’s something that can easily be fixed. Bringing your pages to the attention of search engine users is hard enough even if you don’t sabotage yourself – so make sure you don’t.