Summary: Avoid having multiple pages on the same topic even if they are original – focus your efforts on one page of quality content. It will perform better than many pages that receive diluted SEO efforts.
What is keyword cannibalisation? It is where you’re targeting a particular keyword or phrase on multiple pages of your website. You might do this without really intending too, but as a result, you end up with a bunch of pages all going for the same keyword in the title/header tags.
So for example, you’re running a site on gardening and you decide to target ‘gardening tools’ on 40 of your pages to try and pull people in because that’s what you sell! So you create 40 original pages on gardening tools and upload them. No duplicate content. Why is that a problem?
Google and other search engines will look at your site and ‘see’ your bunch of pages all targeting the same keyword, all of which seem pretty relevant to this keyword. Instead of seeing your site as being an authority on gardening tools, Google has to make a choice between all your different pages, and it does this by selecting the page it thinks best addresses the user’s query.
The effect of doing SEO this way is…
- A loss of the value of internal anchor text – instead of, say, pointing every instance of the phrase ‘gardening tools’ to a single page (which should then be seen by Google to be the most relevant page on that subject, on your website) you’ll be pointing to multiple pages and this dilutes the potential of the internal anchor text linking.
- A loss of the value of external links – these will be spread over all your pages on gardening tools, rather than just one.
- A loss of the quality of your content – the value is going to be diminished as you can’t realistically rewrite a page over and over on the same subject and still keep it interesting and relevant.
- A spread conversion rate of your pages – why bother having a bunch of pages with varied conversion rates? Why not just have one page targeting the same traffic? (If you want to assess which page is written best, Google allows you to split test the page instead)
A better solution is to create a single page of valuable content and concentrate your efforts on getting links to this page, as well as concentrating your internal linking efforts to the page. Of course, there’s no harm in creating a main page and then multiple pages for various gardening tools (for example) – this would be unique, valuable content that would attract traffic for specific products and would provide a better user experience.
If you’ve already fallen into the trap of keyword cannibalisation, start using 301s to direct to the page you’re focusing on. First check and see what external links you have to your pages using Google’s webmaster tools – you can then pick the best page based on which has the best external links and best conversion rate.
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