SEO activities are primarily aimed at boosting a website’s visibility, traffic, and conversion rate. What is the most basic tool for that? Well-selected keywords. Many of them. However, one of the less obvious disadvantages of optimising websites using as many keywords as possible is a phenomenon called content cannibalisation.
What is cannibalisation?
Cannibalisation occurs when a given website contains various articles, subpages, or blog posts that can rank in the context of the same query (keyword) in Google. More often than not, this is because respective subpages broach too similar a subject or have been optimised using identical phrases. Enriching content with undifferentiated keywords is likely to lower the chances for each such element to rank high.
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What does cannibalisation mean in practice?
Let’s assume we’re conducting SEO for a website dedicated to trekking shoes. Oblivious of cannibalisation, we ask a copywriter to put together a few blog posts and content for all subpages, stressing that each text should contain several instances of “trekking shoes.” What may it lead to? Without a shadow of a doubt, this would let Google crawlers associate the overall topic of our portal with trekking shoes, but that’s where the list of merits ends. So, what are the disadvantages?
In most cases, it would turn out that once we have googled “trekking shoes”, our content – although visible in the search results – ranks hardly as high as we’d like it to, and that the order of enlisted subpages changes dramatically – one day, it might be the homepage, and the very next one – a blog post or a random subpage dedicated to a specific product. This, in turn, would prevent us from managing organic traffic and gradually weaken subpages in terms of ranking.
List of negative effects of cannibalisation
- Undermining a website’s authority – instead of entering specific parts of the website and thus contributing to building their authority, users visit multiple different subpages, even those that are only partially related to the topic.
- Depleting “crawl budget” – Google and other search engines read all indexed pages using crawlers, which help algorithms better understand the topic of a given subpage. The said crawlers’ work, however, is also a resource that can be wasted. And it is wasted in the case of cannibalisation. If various subpages compete in terms of the same keywords, crawlers pay attention to all of these subpages, instead of focusing on the one which is best e.g. from the business perspective.
- Lowering conversion rate – it’s only natural that different subpages have different conversion rates; for this reason, if subpages within the same website compete using identical key phrases, there’s a risk that part of traffic generated by a given query will be transferred to a subpage with a lower conversion rate.
How to check if a website is affected by cannibalisation
There are some tools that help identify cannibalisation, such as Ahrefs or Semrush, but we can also choose an easy and financially optimal solution which is conducting a simple Google search:
Google will return a list of all subpages of the yourwebsite.org portal that can be found using the “keyword” phrase.
The formula can be employed in the case of any phrase and any website – thanks to it, we can determine how many subpages within one website can be tracked down with a given query.
Is cannibalisation always negative?
It’s worth noticing that just as in the case of everything SEO-related, there are some exceptions to the rule.
| Example 💡 |
|---|
| If two posts with the same keyword are both highly evaluated, and their rank is unchanging – there is no need to combine them into one. |
But if competing websites begin to outrank yours or if your best-evaluated post stops maintaining the usual click rate, it may be a sign that some kind of action is required. It should be remembered, however, that the phenomenon is not always a bad thing. The actual cannibalisation – with negative impact on our SEO efforts – takes place if:
● after adding a new subpage or optimising an existing one, there is a drastic drop in traffic on another subpage which contains similar keywords;
● after adding a new subpage or optimising an existing one using a selected keyword, the subpage doesn’t get indexed by Google.
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What causes content cannibalisation?
In a nutshell: cannibalisation takes place because two or more subpages compete against each other for visibility in terms of the same search term (phrase typed into Google’s search bar by users). Does it mean, however, that we shouldn’t use identical keywords on different subpages? The answer is “no” – cannibalisation may result from myriad factors, and employing the same key phrases on multiple subpages is a viable option if the intention behind a query is different.
| Example 💡 |
|---|
| If after typing “best shoes to wear in the mountains”, search results show two subpages from the same website, and one is a product page, and the other – a blog post about choosing the best trekking shoes, cannibalisation doesn’t occur, even though both subpages can be found using the same key phrase. |
If using identical phrases doesn’t always lead to cannibalisation, what does? Although – as always when it comes to SEO – the easiest answer would be, “It depends,” we can enlist several possible culprits:
- Too similar content pieces – one of the main reasons behind cannibalisation is excessive similarity between content published on respective subpages. Using similar or identical keywords in various places within the same website is permissible when the main topic is considerably different (as in the above-mentioned example of the best trekking shoes). If all texts are about the same thing or introduce too little factual information and contain mostly generalisations, search engines find it difficult to determine which subpage is more valuable in terms of a given query.
- Badly structured internal linking – linking unrelated subpages haphazardly can mislead search engines.
- Keyword stuffing – enriching content with as many keywords as possible in the hopes that a subpage would be indexed on them may backfire. Each strategically important subpage has to be assigned specific keywords that should not appear too frequently on other subpages. Of course, you cannot always avoid repeating certain phrases, as it depends on the subject matter of the website or the industry – nevertheless, we should strive to at least reduce the number of such repetitions and refrain from introducing them to the featured elements of the structure (such as texts in bold, headers, meta descriptions, or SEO titles).
How to fix keyword cannibalisation
The way we deal with cannibalisation depends on its cause, which – more often than not – is the website’s or the content’s structure. More persistent cases, however, might require the 301 redirect or creating new landing pages.
- Restructure your website
The simplest solution is to make the most trustworthy subpage the new landing page that contains links to other unique subpages with selected keywords.
In terms of our example with shoes, the most reasonable method would be to turn the “/shoes” subpage into our source page and link all the other topically similar subpages to it using the “canonical” tag. - Create new landing pages
Alternatively, there might be no landing page integrating all product pages. If that’s the case, it would be beneficial to create a unique landing page that would serve as a trustworthy source page containing links to all subpages. - Consolidate your content
If your subpages are not unique enough to safely employ the same keyword, consider combining them. This way, you can make use of several subpages with worse performance and transform them into a more trustworthy source. It may also resolve issues with content that lacks substance.
Begin with an analysis to determine which subpage fares best in terms of traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, visit duration, etc. It may turn out that one subpage generates the majority of traffic, but another contains content of the highest conversion potential.
If that’s the case, the solution might be to move the converting content to the subpage generating the most traffic. Ideally, we should aim to maintain the ranking and boost the traffic.
What to do if the top places in the ranking are taken by outdated pages
It might happen that older posts on your website – no longer relevant to your services or product range – still rank high as they use directed keywords. If that’s the case, it would be worthwhile to incorporate all the useful data from the older entries into the newer ones, and then delete the outdated subpages – this will make it easier for search engines to place the most important posts higher in the ranking.
If you need help with determining which subpages are affected by cannibalisation or with devising a recovery plan, reach out to us – we’re always at your disposal!
Cannibalisation is a phenomenon which occurs pretty often, especially in the case of e-shops or specialist websites and blogs. All portals containing numerous texts related to the same topic are at risk of losing visibility due to multiple subpages competing for the same keywords.
By adhering to these guidelines and avoiding common hreflang tag pitfalls, you can optimise your multilingual website’s performance in search engine rankings and provide a more tailored experience to your diverse international audience.
