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So let’s imagine you wake up one day and find yourself on page 1 for “men’s jackets”. We all want to be on the first page if we sell men’s jackets. Then suddenly you notice that your content is declining. When you take a closer look, you might find that multiple URLs are returning over a period of time for the same keyword. It is important to note that cannibalization occurs at the keyword level.
It is not a content level. It’s all in the keyword. So one piece of content doesn’t have to conflict for another term, for a derived term, for example “men’s jackets” or “men’s summer jackets”, and that page can exist nicely on the first page. But let’s imagine you have one, two, three, four pages.
These could be for example men’s summer blazers, men’s winter blazers, men’s blazers 2023. Chances are if those pages are similar and contain the keyword you are trying to position for in the title, ie. “men’s jackets”, chances are you’ll run into a conflict because we know that the HTML title is one of the strongest indicators for Google from a topic perspective.
URL, title, header 1, meta description, content, it all counts. But you’ll find that changes to your headline can have a pretty immediate effect on visibility in less than 24 hours. So, back to our cannibalization situation. For URLs, what do we want to do? Well, we have a decision to make.
Which one do we want to be the entrance to our ecosystem? If we don’t decide, Google will make that decision for us, and we’ll end up in a situation of cannibalization. Cannibalization might be in order. Everything could be happening at the bottom of page 1. Sometimes people say, “Well, I’m on page 1, but I don’t care.”
But you should care, because imagine your audience is looking for a men’s blazer and they find your piece of content and they like it, and they come back the next day and Google it again, and they find it again, “Oh, that’s another page.” They go to a place in another area. I am suddenly confused because we have an incoherent, uncoordinated and haphazard doorway into our world.
So we have to make a decision and not leave it to the search engines. There are a few things we can do to really fix this. But the first thing we need to do is check the position of the URLs for other terms, for derived terms. Do these pieces of content position themselves?
Before we start tinkering, before we start playing with titles, before we start redirecting, before we do anything, do they set themselves? Then we have to decide. One possible choice, and I’ve seen many clients do this, is to merge one of the older pieces of content with the new content, and this works great because we don’t lose anything.
So we put that together and then of course we 301 the original article. So we get that injection of authority right away. Ok, roll back the theme. How to demote a theme? Remember the title, the strongest element on the page? We can actually change the title so it’s not about men’s jackets. We can say “men’s clothes for summer”, if that’s appropriate.
Again, let’s not do this if that page is ranking on its own because we don’t want to lose that traffic. We can also check site traffic. Internal link. If we decide, for example, that A is the page we want to be our gateway, let’s give it the authority it needs to position.
Let’s connect internally from B, C and D to A using the anchor text “men’s jackets”. What are we doing? Well, we tell Google that this page here is all about men’s jackets, and the anchor text and those links will give that page the authority it needs.
So we do it in combination with some of these other options. We can also do without index if needed. So we have a number of tools in our arsenal. But just imagine that we love all these sites and we don’t want to lose them because they are summer blazers, winter blazers, linen blazers and more blazers.
Another thing you can do, if your CMS allows it, is actually build a hub page. Let’s call that center page Men’s Jackets, and link from the new page, let’s call that page X, Men’s Jackets, to this one using the anchor text “summer jackets”, to this one Winter, Bedding, etc. Then, most importantly, we take the internal linking here and go back from all of these to the hub page.
What did we create there? This beautiful central structure within our site that your audience will understand and Google will too. So basically, it’s about sending a signal to Google so that Google doesn’t get confused.
So this is up to us because the search engine is incredibly sensitive. So that’s how you can fix it, and you have a number of choices.