So let’s imagine you wake up one day and find yourself on the first page of “Men’s Blazers.” If we sell men’s blazers, we all want to be on page one. Then suddenly, you notice your content drops. When you look closely, you may see multiple URLs being passed back for the same keyword over a period of time. One thing to note about cannibalization is that it happens at the keyword level.
This is not at the content level. It’s all about keywords. Therefore, a piece of content may not conflict with another term, a derived term (such as “men’s jacket” or “men’s summer jacket”), and the page may exist beautifully on page one. But let’s imagine you have one page, two pages, three pages, four pages.
For example, these could be men’s summer blazers, men’s winter blazers, men’s blazers 2023. If these pages are similar and the title contains the keyword you are targeting, which is “men’s blazers,” then you will most likely have a conflict because we know that HTML titles are Google’s strongest indicators from a topic perspective one.
URL, title, title 1, meta description, content, all of these are important. But you’ll find that when you make changes to your headline, it has a very immediate impact on visibility within 24 hours. Back to cannibalization by our own kind. What do we want to do with the URL? Well, we have to make a decision.
Which one do we want to be the gateway to our ecosystem? If we don’t make the decision, Google will make the decision for us, and we’ll end up being cannibalized. Cannibalization may occur. This can all happen at the bottom of the first page.
But you should care, because imagine your audience is searching for men’s blazers, they find your content and they like it, they come back the next day and Google it again and find it again, “Oh, this is a different page. “They go into sites in different areas. Suddenly, I feel confused because our access to the world is incoherent, uncoordinated, haphazard.
So we need to make the decision and not leave it to the search engines. There are a lot of things we can do to really address this issue. But the first thing we need to do is check the URL locations of other terms, derived terms. Is this content positioned correctly?
Before we start tampering, before we start playing the game, before we start redirecting, before we do anything, are they positioning themselves in their own right? Then we can make a choice. One possible option (and I’ve seen a lot of clients do this) is to merge the old content with the new content, which works really well because we don’t lose anything.
So we merge that and then, of course, we 301 the original article. So we got authorization immediately. Okay, downgrade the theme. How to downgrade the theme? Remember the title, the strongest element on the page? We could actually change the title so it’s no longer about men’s blazers. If appropriate, we could say “summer men’s wear.”
Again, if the page itself is well positioned, we don’t do this because we don’t want to lose traffic. We can also check the traffic of the page. Internal links. For example, if we decide that A is the page we want as a portal, then we give it the permissions it needs to target.
Let’s internally link to A from B, C, and D using the anchor text “Men’s Blazers.” What are we doing? Okay, let’s say to Google, here’s a page that’s all about men’s blazers, and the anchor text and these links will give that page the authority it needs.
So we combine it with some other options. We can also do without indexes if appropriate. So we have a lot of tools in our arsenal. But imagine, we love all those pages and don’t want to lose them because that’s summer blazers, winter blazers, linen blazers and other blazers.
Another thing you can do, if your CMS allows it, is actually build a hub page. Let’s call that center page “Men’s Blazers,” then link down from the new page, call it page Go to this page “Winter Blazers” and more.
What did we create there? This wonderful hub-and-spoke structure within our website, your audience will understand, and Google will understand. So, really, this is sending a signal to Google so that Google doesn’t get confused.
So it’s up to us because search engines are very sensitive. Here’s how to solve the problem, and you have options.
