Keyword cannibalization: when a site competes against itself

It is called keyword cannibalization, and it is one of the main critical issues encountered when managing a site dense with pages and articles and keyword research to find new insights is not performed optimally. Let’s try to find out all about this phenomenon, which basically generates pages on the same site that compete with each other and risk compromising the performance of the entire domain.

What is keyword cannibalization

As the term “cannibalization” suggests, keyword cannibalization identifies a problematic factor for SEO, namely, the presence on the site of URLs that compete for the same keywords, and thus pages that are similar in content and, above all, in keywords identified and positioned by Google.

It is so called because the site is “cannibalizing” its results by dividing CTR, links, content and (often) conversions between two or more pages instead of one, as would be more logical and profitable.

Troubling Google with similar content and keywords

Wanting to explain in even simpler words what cannibalization of keywords and content is, we can say that it is the phenomenon that occurs when Google’s algorithms have trouble figuring out which page of such a site to index and then rank for a given keyword, finding precisely at least two competing on the same key, declined in similar topics. Typically, two scenarios occur when this happens: Google alternates between the two pages in its ranking, sometimes favoring one and sometimes the other, or it positions the “wrong” and less efficient one with respect to the desired strategy, causing the entire site to lose overall positioning.

Keyword cannibalization is a risk for sites

Evolutions in Google Search algorithms have somewhat limited an old trend of making sites, namely to focus an article only on ranking for a single keyword or to attempt to do targeting of specific terms on multiple pages, reasoning from the equation “the more pages we have in search results, the more impressions we will receive from users.”

In reality, the situation is often exactly the opposite: targeting on the single keyword can do more harm than good to a site’s SEO, because precisely if multiple pages rank for the same keyword, they compete with each other, dividing the benefits rather than multiplying them.

More importantly, today we nowadays aim (or should) to optimize the work by focusing the content on the users’ search intent, so as to respond to the specific type of need that prompted the person to use the search engine, and it is Google itself that openly sanctions this, including with the recent