What does Google say about this?
In 2018, John Mueller was asked on Reddit about the phenomenon of keyword cannibalization and its impact on rankings.
How is keyword cannibalization seen by Google? People believe that having multiple pages about the same topic confuses search engines and that hurts their chances of ranking.
(How does Google view keyword cannibalization? People believe that having multiple pages on the same topic confuses the bots, which can affect your rankings)
The user received the following response:
If you have a bunch of pages with roughly the same gambling data taiwan content, it's going to compete with each other, kinda like a bunch of kids wanting to be first in line, and ultimately someone else slips in ahead of them. Personally, I prefer fewer, stronger sites over lots of weaker ones – don't water your site's value down. - John Mueller
(If you have several pages with almost the same content, they will compete with each other - like a group of children trying to see who gets to be in the front row. Eventually, someone outside their group will come out on top. Personally, I prefer a smaller number of strong pages than a large number of poor quality pages - don't dilute the value of your website.
As we can rightly assume, the Google algorithm looks unfavorably at any kind of duplicate or thematically similar content. So let's take a look at the reasons for cannibalization.
Having trouble with your visibility in Google?
Rely on the specialists from KS!
Check out the offer!
Reasons for Keyword Cannibalization
As we have already established, keyword cannibalization affects websites that offer thematically similar content with similar intent, optimized for the same keyword, or have duplicate pages - created intentionally or unintentionally by the CMS. Cannibalization is also caused by inconsistencies in internal and external linking, technical errors, or an improperly designed information structure of the portal or online store. Let's look at each case separately.
The presence of thematically similar pages on the website
Some time ago, one of the recommendations of SEO specialists was to create subpages with content optimized for the same word. This was due to the fact that Google sometimes linked subpages thematically within a domain and "attached" them under a result placed higher in the SERPs. As you can easily guess, such attachment could result in increased traffic from organic results.
Currently, after a number of changes to Google's algorithms - including the Site Diversity Update - such a situation is rare, although it does happen sometimes.
