5 Ways to Prevent Keyword Cannibalization

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Why Keyword Cannibalization Exists
In the past, search engines like Google were much simpler. They crawled and created SERP rankings based on very simple criteria. This eventually led to widespread abuse and misuse of search engines as techniques like “keyword stuffing” became more common.

Google thought that a web page's content might be relevant if it contained azerbaijan phone data a keyword repeatedly, so unscrupulous content producers simply included the same word hundreds or even thousands of times to boost search rankings.

Today, keyword stuffing is one of the worst things you can do and will hurt your search rankings. Modern algorithms react harshly to overt keyword stuffing; keyword cannibalization is an occasional side effect of this effort to punish keyword stuffing with lower search rankings.

Keyword cannibalization occurs when you have too many of the same or similar keywords scattered throughout your website content.

As a result, a search engine like Google is unable to discern which content to rank higher. This means that it will sometimes give a higher rank to a web page that you do not intend to prioritize. It may also lower the rank of all pages that share these keywords.



Fix Keyword Cannibalization
It’s actually quite easy to identify potential keyword cannibalization issues on your website. Typically, running a search along the lines of “Domain + Keywords” will provide you with the information you’re looking for.

You’ll get a list of results, but are they the ones you want? Is that dog food blog post you wrote two years ago somehow ranking higher than your most recent and important one? If so, this would be a perfect example of keyword cannibalization. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to remedy this state of affairs.



1. Merge Content
If you have two web pages that cover azerbaijan phone data similar topics, such as a web page that recommends good dog food and a page that lists bad dog food, you may want to take all of this content and put it on one page.

This solution will not necessarily work for every situation, but, very often, merging content will simplify and increase the search engine optimization of your website.



2. Delete content
It’s extreme, but you might consider deleting the problematic web content entirely, especially if it’s no longer relevant to your website. If the content no longer exists, the problem doesn’t exist.



3. Remove keywords
If you want to keep some specific content for other reasons and the presence of a keyword is not critical, removing it is always an option. This can be a slower and more tedious way of doing things – manual solutions usually are – but they have the advantage of being very simple and easy to implement.