How To Identify & Fix Content Cannibalization Issue - Part 1

Is your website losing traffic?
Is your organic traffic going down?
Are you losing keyword ranking?
Despite trying hard, you are not able to reach on page #1 (Even with new content)
If you answer yes to one or more of this, You might be a victim of Keyword cannibalization.
What is “Cannibalization in SEO” and how it works?
How to find if your website is impacted by Keyword cannibalization
And
How to fix keyword cannibalism issue.
This is what you are going to learn today.

This is an extra-ordinary issue that could happen to anyone who has a website, and never focused on Keyword mapping or building logical internal links or could be happen due to uncontrollable circumstances

Let’s dive deep into this subject, and learn something new today.

Keyword cannibalization is an SEO issue that occurs when more than one page of your website is trying to rank for the same/similar keywords. This confuses the search engine, and it periodically tries to understand which one of the pages should be ranked on the first page.

In a lack of clear direction, it lowers down the ranking of all pages, and none of them rank for the target keyword.

Another common cause of Keyword cannibalization is when a webmaster creates multiple pages targeting the same topic. This may work initially, but as search evolves, those different pages end up serving the same searcher intent.
Most of the time this happens unintentionally, but the traffic and ranking impact of this is severe.
In my finding, I have seen an entire cluster of pages (category) losing the ranking because of keyword cannibalism.

What I found most interesting is, when keyword cannibalization is fixed, it resulted in improved ranking of entire category of pages.

I have tested this theory on a few websites, and every time the competing pages were identified, and proper action is taken, there is a significant improvement in the overall keyword ranking and hence traffic.
Cannibalization is one uncommon SEO issue where a lot of webmasters are not even aware of it. If your website is impacted by it, identifying and fixing this issue would do wonders for your website traffic.
Before that, let’s understand the common causes of cannibalization.
What Causes cannibalization?
1. Creating multiple pages targeting the same keyword:
A lot of bloggers and content marketers, end up creating a lot of pages targeting the same or similar keywords and hoping one of them would rank. This is now an age-old practice and something you should avoid. You can rather create a long-form article to target a bunch of keywords.
2. Improper internal linking:
This is another most common root cause of content cannibalization. At times, bloggers use the same “Keyword” on different articles to link to different pages. This is one sure shot way to confuse search engine bots and hence results in content cannibalization.
Often this is caused due to backlinks with wrong anchor text.