How Do I Identify Cannibalization Problems & Consolidate Without Loss Of Visibility? – Ask An SEO via @sejournal, @rollerblader
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Here's how to address cannibalization using Search Console, site crawlers, and rank trackers, plus fixes like canonicals, meta robots, and internal linking. VIP CONTRIBUTOR Adam Riemer 6 hours ago ⋅ 6 min read VIP CONTRIBUTOR Adam Riemer President at Adam Riemer Marketing Bio Follow 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: One of the easiest ways to detect content cannibalization is in Search Console. 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. 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? 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. 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. Fixing page and content cannibalization is incredibly easy; it just depends on your website and the type of cannibalization happening. 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. Read Full Bio VIP CONTRIBUTOR Adam Riemer President at Adam Riemer Marketing Adam Riemer is an award winning digital marketing strategist, keynote speaker, affiliate manager, and growth consultant with more than 20+ ... Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. An AI-Powered Workflow To Solve Content Cannibalization Ask An SEO: How To Handle Duplicate Content Across Multiple Domains Find Keyword Cannibalization Using OpenAI's Text Embeddings With Examples Join 75,000+ Digital Leaders. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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