Keyword cannibalization
-
Hi,
I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization.
1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations.
The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...).
My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page?
Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content.
Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three?
2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related?
In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans?
In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization?
Looking forward to your comments!
-
Hi,
Thanks for the answer and sorry for the late response.
I understand what you mean, but I still have the following question: there is no possibility to add extra content to the blog category pages, unless through source code. This means I can not add extra text on these pages, so these blog category pages just sum up all the different blog articles of which the titles are H2's. Will these pages ever rank, because it is not really unique content about one subject?
Thanks!
-
I am a Cannibal.
For an important keyword, two pages of substantive, useful and valuable content is better than one. Both of them will often appear within the SERPs and each of them can be optimized for different keyword variants and different searcher intents. Develop ways to link these pages to one another in ways that are obvious and usefully presented to the visitor.
All of this substantive, useful and valuable content can show visitors that you are The Man for this product or this product category.
Sometimes I have numerous pages of substantive, useful and valuable content for one keyword. Sales page, how to use it page, parts and accessories page, maintenance and repair page, comparison of product variants page. All of these link to each other. Where competition is moderate to low I can have two or more pages on the first SERP.
There is nothing wrong about being a cannibal if you do it with substantive, useful and valuable content.
Are you trying to run your competitor out of town or are you farting around?
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
-
How does Yoast SEO premium determine prominent keywords?
We are perplexed how Yoast determines which keywords to select on the page when ranking the top 5 prominent words in Insights. For example, we have a page where birthday parties is clearly the primary keyword. It is used an an H2, in body copy and tagged on images. Yet it does not show up at all. The term 20 Fiesta game points ranks #1. It is mentioned one time on the page in a bullet within one of 5-6 blocks. 40 Fiesta game points ranks 3rd and same situation. Waterpark ranks 4th and is mentioned twice on the page as a bullet of featured activities. But there ar 4-5 other attractions listed in the bullets higher? We have looked as tutorial videos and no one mentions how Yoast determines prominent keywords. Thanks in advance for steering us in the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Teamzig0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How fast to change keyword rich anchor text
Hello, A client of mine has a site with almost all keyword rich anchor text, The problem is on on a bunch of little blogs and some (mostly sitewide) paid links. We are working to move into 100% white hat SEO, but we're doing it slowly. My question is, how fast can we change the anchor text on all of these links? I'm worried that if I do it too fast that it will be a red flag. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
URL Keyword Structure and Importance
Hey Guys, I've done quite a bit of research on this but still can't decide what the correct answer is, so was hoping the Moz community might be able to give some clarification. Say I have a URL **www.yourdomain.com/product/domain-names **is there any benefit in changing my site's backend structure (a relatively lengthly process) so the URL can read **www.yourdomain.com/domain-names **without the 'product' slug? I understand keywords in the URL can have a small impact on SEO, but does the positioning to this degree play any part? Any advice would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paragongroup
Cheers.0 -
Should I build & try to rank several pages for similar keywords?
I have a client who's domain already ranks #1 on Google for 'automotive advertising agency'. However we want several listing on the first page. Should I create a few more pages like www.domain.com/automotive-advertising-agency www.domain.com/advertising-agency www.domain.com/automotive-advertising I'm assuming I can get these pages to rank well, but I'm wondering if Google will penalize us for this. Is this a good or bad idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Avoiding keyword cannibalisation in Wordpress Structure
Hi all, I've been planning the WordPress structure for a client for a long time, and soon need to get started. I keep coming back to this problem / question, whereby there will be a static Page with a name like "Christmas Collection", but there also has to be a Category called "Christmas" to accomodate new content. Is this likely to cause serious keyword cannabalisation? It's a non-ecommerce site To elaborate we need to have the following static Pages: christmas collection easter collection halloween Collection and each of these Page's will be populated with related Posts (based on category ID) after the Page's content. And these corresponding Categories need to be similarly named. As there's no apparent relation between Pages and Categories, I keep coming back to the concern that having a Page named "Christmas Collection" and a Category called "Christmas" is a big SEO NO NO. Any thoughts, opinions, workarounds much appreciated! Regards, c
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | councilflat0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0