This creates confusion for search engines because they don't know which page to rank as the first result for the user and it dilutes the authority of the page on that topic.
For example, imagine you have two pages on your website that are about the same topic, such as " women's shoes ."
both pages contain similar information about different norway mobile phone number types of women's shoes, but they use the same main keyword in their titles, meta descriptions, and content.
In this scenario, seo cannibalization occurs because both pages are competing with each other for the same positioning in the search results for the keyword " women's shoes ."
to prevent this phenomenon, maximize the ranking potential of your keywords by focusing your ranking efforts on a single piece of content tailored to each specific keyword.
How does seo cannibalization affect your website?
Seo cannibalization can negatively impact your website in several ways:
confusion for search engines
search engines like google do not know which of the pages on your website are most relevant to the target keyword.
This can make it difficult for them to determine which page should rank higher in search results.
Ranking decline
as a result of search engine confusion, all cannibalized pages are likely to rank lower for the target keyword than they would if they were not competing with each other.
Loss of traffic
by having multiple pages with similar content, you dilute the traffic you could be receiving on a single page with more complete and relevant content.
It could also have another negative impact, which would be a decrease in organic clicks due to not appearing in the first results in the serp.
Lowering page authority
by competing with each other for the same keywords and having traffic distributed across multiple pages, the authority of the most important pages could be diluted.
This could lead to a drop in search engine rankings.
Decrease in conversion rate
if users land on a page that isn't the most relevant to their query, it can impact their experience and they are more likely to leave the website without taking any action.
In this case, valuable actions for your business such as purchasing a product or subscribing to an email list could be lost.
How to detect seo cannibalization on your website?
If you are the project owner and are familiar with all the content posted on it, you should find this fairly straightforward.
However, if you're joining an ongoing project that you have little knowledge of or it's been a while since you've worked on it and you've lost track, there are several ways to approach it.
This way, you can evaluate the relevance of your website's content and find out if each page has a unique purpose or if they deal with the same topic.
