Duplicate title tags
The title of the page, or tag, is considered one of the ranking factors. In my opinion, it is one of the strongest signals to Google about which keyword a given page should be displayed for. Unfortunately, during audits, I have often encountered a situation where a website had several or a dozen pages with the same Title. The record holder is a wedding website, where I detected several thousand pages with a duplicate title.
Could this be the cause of keyword cannibalization? Absolutely. Although Google also takes into account other factors and can change the Title given by the user if necessary, it is not worth complicating the work of the robots.
Inconsistent internal linking
Another cardinal sin - when it comes to keyword cannibalization - is the lack of consistency in internal linking, namely creating links to different subpages using the same anchors. The texts in the links are a hint to the robots as to what to expect on the other side of the link. If we do not maintain consistency and direct the robot to two different pages using the same phrase, we can experience significant fluctuations in the page's position.
Inconsistent external linking
As with links within a website, when acquiring backlinks, it may happen that the same anchors lead to several different subpages. If we want to avoid cannibalization, we should thoroughly analyze the link profile.
No canonical tags
Canonical tags indicate a representative URL among many similar ones. They should always be used, if only to avoid indexing almost identical subpages. This problem is particularly visible in e-commerce, where products are sorted or filtered in a category. As a result, we get several pages with similar content that will compete with each other if they are not marked with a link to the canonical page (rel=canonical).
Cannibalization between subdomains
An interesting type of keyword cannibalization occurs when Google thematically links a domain and a subdomain. Not so long ago, creating an online store for a manufacturer's website on a subdomain resulted - with a bit of luck - in both addresses appearing in search results for the same keyword. The subdomain and the domain were treated as two separate entities. The previously mentioned update - Site Diversity Update - along with a number of other changes in algorithms meant that now, with a strong thematic link, URLs within the subdomain will be considered an integral part of the domain and, according to the principle of "one link per domain", the stronger page will be displayed.
There are of course exceptions to this rule. Take Allegro and its dominance in the top two and sometimes even three positions in SERPs. Nevertheless, it will be more beneficial for the service to have one, well-optimized page than a dozen or so of poor quality.
Incorrect information structure
A significant part of cannibalization is caused by the incorrect structure of information within the page. Tags that overlap with categories or each other, similar categories in different areas of the same e-commerce, a large number of tags that return the same results - all these errors cause you to fight with yourself for high positions. This situation applies primarily to online stores and extensive blogs.
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The Effects of Keyword Cannibalization
Now that we know why cannibalization can occur on your site, let's take a look at the effects it can have.
Weaker positions - if there are several subpages optimized at a similar level for the same keywords within a domain, they will compete with each other. As a result, we may not see any of our pages in the Top 10.
Less traffic - since your website will not appear in high positions, organic traffic will be low, which will translate into the final conversion or profit from displayed ads.
Large fluctuations in position - a page will appear in the top for one day, and then drop out of the top 100. As you can easily guess, the organic traffic for such a subpage, on a monthly basis, will not be great.
How to detect cannibalization in a service
There are several ways to check if your site is experiencing keyword cannibalization.
Position monitoring
This method consists of checking whether there are no large fluctuations in the position monitoring tool - (even by several dozen positions) with the change of the ranking page. For example, in SeoStation, cannibalization is shown in the screenshot below:
cannibalization in SeoStation
cannibalization in SeoStation
Yellow dots show a change in the dominant URL for a website, which is also accompanied by an increase or decrease in position by a few points.
Domain-to-subdomain cannibalization - large position fluctuations
Domain-to-subdomain cannibalization - large position fluctuations
Another example of cannibalization in search results. Both the manufacturer's website and the store, which are located within the same domain, rank for the same phrase. Separate monitoring was created for both subdomains. In the above screenshot, we can see large daily fluctuations in positions, which result from the fact that Google has very strongly linked both subdomains with each other and displays only one result from the domain. One day the store occupies the top, and the next day the manufacturer's website is at the top.
When is cannibalization not a problem?
URL changes in monitoring are not always a big problem. You should always verify whether two different addresses appear in the search results, which simply swap places. For places in the top 3, this is an extremely favorable situation. However, if we occupy the lower areas of the top 10, we should consider consolidating addresses in order to fight for better positions.
Some monitoring also has the ability to count the appearance of a page in the so-called map package. When the main page is not yet positioned, but the company's business card appears in the SERPs, we can see significant fluctuations in the charts.
ProTip - Set your homepage address with UTM parameters on your Google business card. This will allow you to track how much traffic your business card generates.
Google Search Console
To check if a website is struggling with keyword cannibalization, we can also use Google Search Console. From the side panel, select Performance , then select the Query filter and enter the keyword phrase gambling data taiwan phone number that interests us. Remember to select the Exact query option . Otherwise, the tool will show us all the keywords containing the phrase. The next step is to go to the pages tab just below the chart. Ideally, one subpage URL should appear there. However, if there are several, we may have a problem with cannibalization.
When is cannibalization not a problem?
The appearance of search results evolves and from time to time, new features and conveniences for users appear. Unfortunately, they make it difficult to properly analyze the data provided to us by analytical tools. The appearance of several URLs for one phrase is not always a problem. The presence of sitelinks or links in the FAQ schema and the appearance of a Google business card can give a misleading picture of the situation.
Ahrefs
Another tool that successfully detects keyword cannibalization is Ahrefs. After entering the domain's web address and selecting the Organic Keywords option from the side menu, we will see a set of keywords that the domain is displayed for. We can export this data to a file and process it in a separate tool or sort it by the Keyword column and find those that are repeated more than once.
cannibalization detection in Ahrefs
cannibalization detection in Ahrefs
When is cannibalization not a problem?
It is worth paying attention to additional markings at URL addresses. It may turn out (as in the screenshot above) that these addresses appear as sitelinks or a graphic is also displayed for the phrase.
Screaming Frog
We can detect a significant portion of potential cannibalization problems using a page crawling tool such as Screaming Frog . To detect addresses that may be a problem, we look for duplicate title tags in the crawl. These can be pages in pagination, filters, sorting, search results, etc. Online stores in particular should pay special attention to this type of pages.
Search operator
Google allows you to view search results unfiltered by the algorithm. If you are interested in whether similar subpages are competing for a given phrase, it is worth entering &filter=0 in the browser bar at the very end of the address . It is best to supplement this entry with the &num=100 element so that the maximum number of results in SERPs is displayed on one page.
Thanks to this, we will be able to see whether any of the subpages is lurking in hiding and blocking the right one from advancing a few points in the ranking.
ProTip: This method does not work for queries that display e.g. Allegro. After disabling filtering, it sometimes happens that there are so many results from one domain that it is impossible to find pages that normally rank in the top 20. You can then use an additional search operator and remove the problematic domain ( -example.com)
