Avoiding Keyword Cannibalisation

Keyword Cannibalisation is the term used for the common SEO mistake of having several of your website’s pages targeting the same keyword.  This confuses the search engines as to which page to serve back to users.  This also confuses other sites owners that want to link to your site thereby leading different sites to link to different pages leading to a dilution of your link popularity.

So what are the most common causes of keyword cannibalisation?

1. Duplicate Title and Meta Tags

2. Duplicate Content

3. Similar internal links pointing to different pages.

How do you solve Keyword Cannibalisation?  Easy,  make sure each of your pages are targeting different keywords by optimising the meta tags and ensuring unique content on each page.  Also ensure that all internal links on your website support the landing pages’ keyword target.

There are various tools available to help you solve Keyword Cannibalisation including:

1. Conducting a site colon search ie type site:yoursite.com in Google;  You can tell by browsing the results if you’re suffering from Keyword Cannibalization.

2. Performing permanent redirects (301) to ensure that many pages with similar content are all merged into one.

3. Using content similarity tools to check duplicate content, a good tool of this sort can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

To sum up, make sure that your website’s pages are not cannibalised by following the simple steps mentioned above.  Good luck!