In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you identify it, and how can you fix it? Watch the episode to find out. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
What is cannibalization?
When one site has two competing URLs and performs less well because of it
- Google may get confused about which one to show
- This could be due to the site splitting its equity between its two different URLs
- Alternatively, it could be that Google wishes to show a commercial page and an informational page on the same search result
Classic cannibalization
The classic case of cannibalization is when two URLS appear at the same time, and they sort of supplant each other in the SERP.
- When one of them ranks, the other just falls away to oblivion, isn’t even in the top 100.
Consolidate or differentiate?
If there should only be one page, combine the best of the content, pick the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history, and redirect the other URL to this combined page that has the best content.
- Don’t want them to cannibalize each other.
Less-obvious cases
Sometimes it’s less obvious though.
- For example, if you Google search Naples, as in the place name, you’ll see Wikipedia ranking first and second, and the Wikipedia page at the top is about Naples, Italy, while the second is about Florida.
- Google decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword “Naples” requires multiple intents to be served, and Wikipedia happens to be the best page for two of those purposes.
Quick Tip
Think about what other pieces exist that are essentially the same as this one.
- If there is something that’s basically the same keyword then you might want to consider consolidating or redirecting or maybe just updating the old piece to avoid cannibalization.
Do we think we’re underperforming?
Do we have other examples of similar keywords where we only have one page, where we’re doing significantly better?
- Or was it the case that when we introduced the second page, we suddenly collapsed?
- If we see behavior like that, then that might, you know, it’s not clear-cut, give us some suspicions.
Do competing pages both appear?
Look for similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, e.g. “best burgers” and “buy burgers.”
- If those two keywords had completely different results in general, then we might think, oh, okay, we should have two separate pages here.
