Best practice to avoid cannibalization of internal pages
-
Hi everyone,
I need help from the best SEO guys regarding a common issue : the cannibalization of internal pages between each other.
Here is the case :
Let's say I run the website CasualGames.com. This website provides free games, as well as articles and general presentation about given categories of Casual Games.
For instance, for the category "Sudoku Games", the structure will be :
- Home page of the game : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/
- Free sudoku game listings : (around 100 games listed) http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/free/
- A particular sudoku game : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/free/game-1/
- A news regarding sudoku games : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/news/title
The problem is that these pages seem to "cannibalize" each other. Explanation :
In the SERPS, for the keyword "Casual Games", the home page doesn't appear well ranked and some specific sudoku games page (one of the 100 games) are better ranked although they are "sub-pages" of the category.. Same for the news pages : a few are better ranked than the category page..
I am kind of lost.. Any idea what would be the best practice in this situation?
THANKS a LOT.
Guillaume -
Thanks Adam.
I started to use breadcrumbs a few months ago but I guess It was too late.. The website is jeuxcasino.com, it provides free casino games. The main category page is for instance :
http://www.jeuxcasino.com/machine-a-sous/ for the "machine a sous" games.
But when I google the word "machine a sous", I have individual game pages or articles like this http://www.jeuxcasino.com/machine-a-sous/news/348-le-travail-technicien-machine-sous...
-
If you want the category page to rank for the keyword instead of an individual game page:
- Make sure the category page is well-optimized for that keyword
- Have all the game pages link to the category page (i.e. use breadcrumbs)
- Ensure the category page is linked to from the homepage
- Consider reducing the optimization of the game page(s) for the particular keyword
Without seeing the actual site and pages, that's all I can think of at the moment.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
What's the best SEO practice for having dynamic content on the same URL?
Let's use this example... www.miniclip.com and there's a function to log in... If you're logged in and a cookie checks that you're logged in and you're on page, let's say, www.miniclip.com/racing-games however the banners being displayed would have more call to action and offers on the page when a user is not logged in to entice them to sign up but the URL would still be www.miniclip.com/racing-games if and if not logged in, what would be the best URL practice for this? just do it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0