Keyword Cannibalization – A Definitive Guide To Solve This Problem

To tackle with the problem of keyword cannibalisation, at first we have to know and understand what it actually means. Keyword Cannibalization by definition means targetting a single keyword in multiple posts or pages of your website. Yes, that’s it. No big deal! But wait its really not that simple as you think it to be.

Keyword Cannibalization is one of the main reasons I lost rankings of many high search volume keywords. And not only me, there are many other  bloggers and SEOs who have faced this problem of keyword cannibalisation in their early days of blogging and SEO career.

So this problem mainly occurs hen you target a single keyword on multiple pages of your site. Lets take an example, suppose you have written a post on “purple flowers”. Now you have somehow seen this particular article becoming very popular in your site and you have started writing more and more articles on this same topic. Suppose you have written 5-6 articles targetting this same keyword “purple flowers” and have published them on your site. Now what will happen if you so this? This is the big question.

You may think all your posts will get good rank for this keyword, but actually something opposite will happen. Search engines will take only one post which it think to be the most relevant and scrap the other ones. Now what effect will it have on your blog. The effect is quite disturbing. You will loose your potential ranking and also lots and lots of visitors. Moreover, your hard work of writing 5-6 articles will all go into vain, as only a single post will be selected among them.

Keyword cannibalisation simply means that your site has started behaving like a cannibal and is slowly eating up itself. It is a big problem in SEO, that is really difficult to detect. I mean, if your rankings on certain keywords drop, it really hard to detect whether it is because of the problem of Keyword Cannibalization or not. So, it is really very important to take effective measures to either prevent or cure your site from the effects of Keyword Cannibalization.

Looking At Keyword Cannibalization From Google’s POV

To solve any problem, you need to dig deeper into the problem and understand it from its core. This is what I did when I also became a victim of keyword cannibalization.

Let us understand this problem from the search engines point of view. Suppose you are Google Crawler or bot. You need to rank a site for a certain keyword. You crawl the site and find about 8-10 pages having almost the same type of content. All the pages are relevant for this term, and are eligible to be ranked for. “But which page to rank?”, this is what you are thinking right now, as a search engine bot.

You are completely confused as you don’t know which page to rank in the SERP’s. All of them seems to be similar to you for a certain keyword or term. Now you will pick up a single post depending on various other factors like link juice, etc and rank it, and simply scrap the rest.

If you think once and try to figure out as why we are actually doing SEO?  The definition of SEO says, that it is the science of making your site more search engine friendly. Or more simply, as SEOs we are trying to help the search engines to select a page to rank for a certain keyword. But in the case of keyword cannibalisation, we are not at all helping the search engine bots, but are making their work more and more difficult.

A Wrong Conception About Keyword Cannibalization

There remains a wrong conception about keyword cannibalisatn among many bloggers, that what I myself too had long back. Its a completely a wrong idea that writing too many articles one same topic increases your sites relevancy with respect to the particular topic. I too thought that if I can write many articles targetting a particular keyword which I want to rank for, the it will increase the relevancy of my site with respect to that keyword and will help me to rank better.

I was absolutely wrong. The complete opposite thing happened to me. I lost all my ranks due to keyword cannibalisation. Relevancy really doesn’t increase in this fashion. What you can do, is write articles targetting related keyword to the particular keyword which you want to rank for.