Solving Keyword Cannibalisation WITHOUT exact match internal links
-
Hi guys,
I have an ecommerce client I'm working with (they are a tour operator).
The client has multiple variations of very very similar tours which has created a keyword cannibalisation issue.
I've read this blog from Rand on the issue, and I understand that I need to use internal links to show the bots which page I want to rank for which term.
Problem is, I cant use exact match anchor text as it wouldn't adequately describe the tour from a user's perspective.
eg I want a single page to rank for 'Los Angeles Tour' however, because the tour also takes in san francisco, I cant use the exact match anchor text 'Los Angeles Tour' because it doesn't give users a realistic indication of the page that they are going to.
My solution...
Is to use the internal linking structure eg 'San Francisco & Los Angeles Tour', This has the keyword phrase I want to optimise for within the anchor text.
Does this have the same effect as using the exact match anchor text?
I cant really see any other solution, so I'm guessing that s the right course of action
Your thoughts would be much appreciated
-
Consistent anchor text can help you resolve the issue. If you have several pages which cover very similar topics, that's great! You can rank for multiple pages in SERPs. You can even land several of your links at the top of the first page.
"Los Angeles tour", "Los Angeles tours", "LA tour", "LA tours", etc. can all be used. If you have 4 strong pages that cover that topic, split up your keywords and if your pages are great quality you can dominate the SERPs.
Do you have more the 4 pages for that topic? "Two day LA tours", "2 day LA tours", "LA tours 2 days", etc. You can expand or contract to meet your needs. The key is generated GREAT content, and consistently using proper anchor text throughout your site.
-
Hi Ryan,
That's very clear and you've stated exactly what i'm planning to do, which is always good to hear:)
I know that I need to map keywords intelligently and use on page content and meta data to reinforce those keyword choices, however the crux of my issue (keyword cannibalisation) is that I have tens or hundreds of pages with similar content and phraseology.
Normally, I would use internal linking to indicate to the bots what page I want to rank for what phrase.
But if (for whatever reason) I cant use exact match internal links, do non-exact match internal links have the same effect?
I suppose to attempt to answer my question, (and to avoid going round in circles!), because I cant fix the problem as usual through exact match internal linking, I need to look at the issue holistically and rather than say the internal linking structure will fix the problem for me, I also need to be very careful with every aspect of on page (meta tags, alt tags, image filenames, on page content).
It's not the silver bullet that I was hoping for, but do you think that is the best solution?
thanks for all your help
j
-
Cannibalization happens when your site has multiple pages competing for the same keyword or phrase.
Let's assume your site has a page offering a tour of Los Angeles, another page which offers tours of Bevery Hills (part of the LA area for those not familiar with California), and another page offering a combined tour of LA + San Francisco. It would be reasonable to refer to all three pages with the term "Los Angeles tour".
The problem is when someone types "Los Angeles tour" into a search engine, which page does Google return to represent your site? While all three pages can represent your site somewhere in SERP, it is more likely that you can miss the first few pages because you are cannibalizing your own traffic. Rather then having one strong "Los Angeles Tour" page, you have three pages dividing the juice.
The solution is, for any page on your site, determine which keyword phrases are the primary focus of that page. Going forward, always direct any appropriate phrases to the page using anchor text. What you would not want to ever do is use the same "Los Angeles tour" text as a link to different pages on your site.
Is that a bit clearer?
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately it's not 100% clear to me still though.
I think the problem stems from the fact that I don't have a simple 'vanilla' product, I have a complex product that needs to be described properly in the internal linking to be clear to users
So in response to your response!
I do appreciate the good point you make in the second paragraph about relevance, however following my example:
My page is highly relevant for the query 'Los Angeles Tour' as the product spends 5 days in LA and one day in SF.
Therefore my page should quite rightly rank for 'los angeles tour'...however it is not just a 'Los Angeles tour' it also takes in SF, and I need to specify that in the internal link to be clear to users.
So, if I cant use the exact match phrase "Los Angelese Tour" my intention is to use the phrase "San Francisco & Los Angeles Tour" in the internal linking and that by having the phrase "los angeles tour" within the internal link (as long as I dont use that phrase in internal links anywhere else on the site), I will indicate to Google that that is the page I want to rank for the phrase "los angeles tour", thus preventing keyword cannibalisation
Does that work as a way of preventing keyword cannibalisation, and if not, how do I avoid the keyword cannibalisation problem without exact match internal linking?
thanks v much for your help
j
-
Hi James.
You can certainly use "San Francisco & Los Angeles Tour" as your anchor text. Clearly, that will only offer an exact match if a user entered in that phrase as their search query. All things being equal, if someone entered "Los Angeles Tour" as their search query, your page would not appear until after all the "Los Angeles tour" exact match pages. Of course, all things are never equal, but I think this is the information you were seeking.
If your client offers tours of Los Angeles, tours of San Francisco, and a combined tour of both I would consider offering a page dedicated to each tour. If the only tour is a combined tour, then clearly your tour is less relevant to the "Los Angeles tour" term, and your rankings should reflect that relevancy.
Your question jumped around a bit so I am not sure if that is the answer you are seeking.
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
-
Replacing keywords by synonyms. Will it increase risk of google keyword stuffing penalization?
I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms.
However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?0 -
Questions About Link Detox
Greetings: In April of 2014 an SEO firm ran a link removal campaign (identified spammy links and uploaded a disavow). The overall campaign was ineffective and MOZ domain rank has fallen to 24 from about 30 in the last year and traffic is 20% lower. I purchased a basic package for Link Detox and ran a report today (see enclosed) to see if toxic links could be contributing to our mediocre rankings. As a novice I have a few questions for you regarding this the use of Link Detox: -We scored a domain wide detox risk of 1,723. The site has referring root domains with 7113 links to our site. 121 links were classified as high audit priority. 56 as medium audit priority. 221 links were previously disavowed and we uploaded a spreadsheet containing the names of the previously disavowed links. We had LinkDetox include an analysis of no-follow links as they recommend this. Is our score really bad? If we remove the questionable links should we see some benefit in ranking? -Some of the links we disavowed last year are still linking to our site. Is it worthwhile to include those links again in our new disavow file? -Prior to filing a disavow we will request that Webmaster remove offending links. LinkDetox offers a package called Superhero for $469.00 that automates the process. Does this package effectively help with the entire process of writing and tracking the removal requests? Do you know of any other good alternatives? -A feature called "Boost" is included in the LinkDetox Super Hero package. It is suppose to expedite Google's processing of the disavow file. I was told by the staff at Link Detox that with Boost Google will process the disavow within a week. Do you have any idea if this claim is valid??? It would be great if it were true. -We never experienced any manual penalty from Google. Will uploading a disavow help us under the circumstances? Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!!! Alan p2S6H7l
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Disavow Links & Paid Link Removal (discussion)
Hey everyone, We've been talking about this issue a bit over the last week in our office, I wanted to extend the idea out to the Moz community and see if anyone has some additional perspective on the issue. Let me break-down the scenario: We're in the process of cleaning-up the link profile for a new client, which contains many low quality SEO-directory links placed by a previous vendor. Recently, we made a connection to a webmaster who controls a huge directory network. This person found 100+ links to our client's site on their network and wants $5/link to have them removed. Client was not hit with a manual penalty, this clean-up could be considered proactive, but an algorithmic 'penalty' is suspected based on historical keyword rankings. **The Issue: **We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick. When talking about scaling this tactic, we run into some ridiculously high numbers when you talk about providing this service to multiple clients. **The Silver Lining: **Disavow Links file. I'm curious what the effectiveness of creating this around the 100+ directory links could be, especially since the client hasn't been slapped with a manual penalty. The Debate: Is putting a disavow file together a better alternative to paying for crappy links to be removed? Are we actually solving the bad link problem by disavowing or just patching it? Would choosing not to pay ridiculous fees and submitting a disavow file for these links be considered a "good faith effort" in Google's eyes (especially considering there has been no manual penalty assessed)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
What's the best internal linking strategy for articles and on-site resources?
We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Best internal linking structure?
We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0