Keyword Cannibalization is an important SEO term that emerges as a result of the indexing of similar or duplicate pages on your website by Google. Also known as keyword cannibalism.
It occurs as a result of using the same keyword and its derivatives on other pages. This causes more than one of your pages to rank in the same query. Therefore, your pages with keyword cannibalization problems become competing pages among themselves. As a result, the traffic and conversion metrics you get will be divided by the number of pages with keyword cannibalization issues.
Almost every website can have a keyword cannibalization problem. In such a case, the problem should be detected early and intervened correctly. Otherwise, it is inevitable that you will experience huge traffic and ranking losses.
What are the causes of Keyword Cannibalization?
Duplicate content and duplicate pages
Even if the copy content problem is not made consciously, the content management system (CMS) used can cause you to encounter this problem. These systems can create pages in the background without even knowing it, and these created pages can become duplicates with a previously opened page.
Similar content and similar pages
Thanks to its semantic improvements, Google can detect synonyms and similar phrases. Pages serving similar purposes can also cause keyword cannibalization problems.
Weak content
Your pages that do not have enough content may change to similar page status among themselves. For this reason, your ranking pages are constantly changing due to their poor content. Therefore, keyword cannibalization problem arises by constantly scattering your traffic and conversion values to different pages instead of a single page.
Paginated content
Presenting the content on your website with the pagination method means creating a different URL, that is, a different page for each page. Since these pages have very similar content and URL addresses by nature, they can cause keyword cannibalization problem.
How to detect Keyword Cannibalization issue?
There are many different methods for keyword cannibalization problem detection. One of them is to constantly monitor the general status of your website with analysis tools such as google analytics.
A drop in overall traffic may require you to specifically check the traffic values of each of your pages. You should analyze your specifically falling pages. Traffic losses on these pages may have arisen due to the keyword cannibalization problem.
Third party tools
Apart from that, you can track keyword performance with the help of paid or free third party tools such as ahrefs and semrush. The performance degradation of your suddenly declining keywords may be due to keyword cannibalization.
Google advanced search methods
In addition, there are various query methods to find out which of your pages are indexed on Google in any keyword search.
- Keyword query method
site:sitename.com keyword
All pages of your website indexed by Google related to the keyword entered in this query are listed.
- URL query method
site:sitename.com inurl:keyword
In this query, all pages indexed by Google with keywords in the URL address are listed.
- Title query method
site:sitename.com intitle:keyword
In this query, all indexed pages with keywords in the title are listed.
- Content query method
site:sitename.com incontent:keyword
In this query, all pages that contain keywords and are indexed in Google are listed.
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