SEOMOZ tool - on page optmization question
-
Ok, I had the tool examine a page and while I got an A, it did say this.....
Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization
Easy fix
<dl>
<dt>Cannibalizing link</dt>
<dd>"Kitchen Storage Racks", "Home Storage Racks", "Garage Storage Racks", "Wine Storage Racks", "Bicycle Storage Racks", and "wine storage racks"Explanation</dd>
<dd>It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site (sometimes two if you've already achieved high rankings and are seeking a second, indented listing). To prevent engines from potentially seeing a signal that this page is not the intended ranking target and creating additional competition for your page, we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. Note that using modified versions is sometimes fine (for example, if this page targeted the word 'elephants', using 'baby elephants' in anchor text would be just fine).</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>Unless there is intent to rank multiple pages for the target keyword, it may be wise to modify the anchor text of this link so it is not an exact match.</dd>
</dl>
The keyword that was optimized was "storage racks". In the explanation it says that baby elephants is fine if elephants is your keyword so why isn't
wine storage racks or kitchen storage racks ok
what is the difference? why is mine cannibalizing but baby elephants is not?
This may be very simplistic to you all but I'm learning as i go, thank you in advance
-
Hi Terrie,
Don't feel bad about asking the question at all - this is a tough topic to get your head around!
In fact, rather than butcher an explanation and confuse you more, I would recommend you read this excellent post from Rand How to Solve Keyword Cannibalization. The post is from 2007, but still the best and simplest explanation of how to fix the problem that I have seen so far. I would suggest you read the comments as well - Rand has dropped a whole lot more excellent information in his answers.
The key to seeing the difference here is not just about the keywords, but the anchor text and which pages the links are pointed to.
Once you follow the structure illustrated in Rand's post, it should become much easier to understand, and also much easier to spot the problem when you look at the pages on your site.
Hope that helps,
Sha
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Renamed a page and created a 301, page lost its rankings.
We changed a page name to fall under the root of our site from domain.com/page1/page301d/ to domain.com/page301d/ and after 2 weeks it still is not back to its #3 position. Now it is on the bottom of page 3. I cant figure out what im doing wrong here. The original .com/page1/ that this page fell under was removed totally and redirected to antoher page that was more relevant. I went ahead and re-enabled this page and its contnent, because the page was linking out to the page we 301d. This page we re-enabled had about 150 links poitning to it and therefore i was thinking that maybe the link juice from this page (or relevancy) via an internal link was helping it rank. This was updated about 6 days ago and the internal link is back Any other ideas why this might not be working. Ive checked all the 301s, content has not changed on the page. We have updated the strcuture for many pages. Instead of having the pages in question fall under anotehr page, they all fall under the root and its sub content is now only 2 levels deep , instead of being 3. hope that makese sense.
On-Page Optimization | | waqid0 -
Question about the variations of keyphrases on different pages
Hi, I am a big fan of seomoz and read a lot of articles! I have a new site for services in London. I have 5 main keyphrases on 5 different pages. Would it be better to make new pages with variations of those 5 keyphrases? As an example: one of the main keyphrases is "Service London" and I want to create new pages -- "Services West Ruislip", "Services Poplar", "Services Brixton" and etc. Should it be better to do it as described or to keep the 5 main keywords and focus on them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | yanko840 -
Pages vs Posts
What are your thoughts on pages vs posts? I am setting up a new blog for a client but not sure how to structure the content. I may just do posts or a whole bunch of page listed down the sidebar. It seems like my pages always rank better than my posts. Has anyone else noticed this? Could it be because of the dates tied posts?
On-Page Optimization | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
SeoMOZ meta descriptions
Anyone notice that seoMOZ doesn't use meta descriptions? Any idea why not?
On-Page Optimization | | SoulSurfer80 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
Blog page outranks static page for KW -- why?
Blog page ranks 10 in Google, while the static page is on page 7. What makes it more interesting is that the blog page scores an "F" with the Term Target tool while the static page scores an "A". Static page has more inbound links and a mR/mT of 3.89/ 4.54 vs. 3.71/ 4.14 for the blog page. Any ideas on how to approach this one?
On-Page Optimization | | 540SEO0 -
Pages crawled
I noticed there is a limited in the number of pages crawled on galena.org? Will this number increase over time?
On-Page Optimization | | nskislak240