Today’s Ask an SEO question is:
“I suspect my site has content cannibalization issues – multiple pages competing for similar keywords. How do I identify cannibalization problems at scale, and what’s the best way to consolidate or differentiate pages without losing existing rankings?”
Great question, and it’s an easy one to detect and problem-solve, especially for websites that are using large language models (AI) to create content. LLMs not only produce thin content, but they also produce repetitive content that leads to this issue. It doesn’t matter how good your prompting is.
Here are three easy ways to do this below with both free and paid tools:
- Google Search Console.
- Crawlers and metadata.
- SEO tools with rank trackers.
Google Search Console
One of the easiest ways to detect content cannibalization is in Search Console.
- In the performance dashboard, as you log in, click on “full report.”
- Look for the query you want in the middle section of the page (use the query filter and enter the main keyword or phrase).
- Click on the keyword phrase, and it will show you all of the URLs showing up for this phrase.
Don’t panic if you see multiple URLs; this is normal. Cannibalization can be happening if two or more are splitting the traffic about evenly and over the same time. Another sign is if each page sticks around the third to fifth page of Google where one used to be in the top 10. If this happened after the competing pages went live, that is likely cannibalization.
In this situation, you may want to:
- Combine the two.
- Delete the new one while adding missing talking points to the first.
- Find a way to make it different enough so it meets a different query need.
Now repeat this process for a few other high-volume keywords and see if they also have the same issue. If they do, this could be another sign of cannibalization.
One thing to keep in mind: If the two pages are complementary, where one is a how-to guide and the other is a conversion page, this is not cannibalization, and Google knows which page serves what purpose. You’re doing your job as an SEO and a marketer. They’re getting the traffic based on the intent of the user, which could be the same keyword, but at a different stage in their journey.
Pro tip: When auditing sites, I do this for product pages, a category or multiple categories, blog posts, and the entire website if there’s a few versions (languages, wholesale vs. consumer, etc.). By knowing if it is sitewide or specific groupings and types of pages I can detect and fix the cause more quickly.
See also: Ask An SEO: Is It Better To Refresh Content Or Create New Pages?
Crawlers To Collect Metadata And H Tags
There’s no shortage of crawlers from Screaming Frog and Sitebulb to Botify and Deepcrawl. All of them can pull in meta data including title tags and H tags. Some sync up with rank tracking tools, Search Console, and analytics which is even better. If you think you have cannibalization in mass, run a crawl and extract the title tags and H1 tags.
Next sort your spreadsheet or the list in the tool and look to see which ones are duplicate or similar. If you are able, see if they have similar amounts of traffic or if the original pages lost traffic based on when the new, similar pages launched. These could be signs of cannibalization at large, and it may not be new content and pages causing the issue. It could be existing pages that are now confusing the search engines.
If you changed your product pages and added variants, the canonical tags may not have been set correctly allowing the new pages to compete with the original. The same goes with updating plugins and having tags, site search queries, or category pages no longer blocked in robots.txt or a change in meta robots. When you change how you instruct search engines to crawl, index, and ignore, you create cannibalization problems.
SEO Rank Trackers
With the elimination of the 100 parameter from Google, rank trackers may face substantial obstacles in that their costs to track rank will skyrocket or they can no longer provide accurate and top 100 results. But for now, tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Authority Labs are available and able to assist.
Each of these tools allows you to see keyword phrases stuck in the mid-20s to lower 50s and shows how many URLs appear for the phrase. Some, like Semrush, show you which page or pages showed up over the past year or so, and ones like Authority Labs list all of the URLs with their rankings by keyword phrase making it incredibly easy to detect cannibalization.
If you have multiple pages at the same time, and none of them are making it to the top 10, or they keep changing, search engines may be confused as to which page is the official one. In other words, you have a cannibalization problem.
To Fix Cannibalization
Fixing page and content cannibalization is incredibly easy; it just depends on your website and the type of cannibalization happening.
- Meta robots can be applied programmatically to a series of pages and tell search engines not to index specific folders, duplicate pages, parameters, etc.
- Canonical links can say what the official version of a page is if variants, duplicate, and other cannibalization issues are happening.
- Update your internal links and make sure the proper intent of the keywords being linked off of goes to the correct page, i.e., if the wording around “apples” is about buying apples, go to a conversion page. If it is informative, explaining where apples come from, link apples to the informative page about apples.
- Create a list of topics that the content team cannot write about unless they clear it with SEO to help prevent new pages competing with old pages. Your job isn’t to tell them they cannot write it; it is to help them find a new talking point or angle that complements the page that should rank.
Cannibalization happens, and it can happen at scale, impacting revenue. By identifying where it happens on a website and why it is happening, you can fix it relatively easily. I hope this helps.
More Resources:
- Google Answers SEO Question About Keyword Cannibalization
- Should We Optimize For Keywords With High Search Volume Or Competition?
- I Helped Build Google’s Keyword System. Here’s Why It’s Becoming Obsolete
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
