Please Help- Confusion about how to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization and Keyword Stuffing
-
I am pretty much a rookie when it comes to the SEO game and to be completely honest SEO is really confusing. I just recently started using MOZ and I was looking at my On-Page report and I saw that I needed to correct some “Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization” errors. So I looked at the error and the fix. Here is what MOZ gave me.
Cannibalizing link
"How to make a fake diploma", "How to get a fake diploma", "Making a Fake High School Diploma", "Fake Diploma Template", and "Framing your fake diploma"
Explanation
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).
Recommendation
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.
This error is for my Hompage(http://www.fake-diploma.com) for the keyword Fake Diploma. My understanding is that for Self-Cannibalization to occur I would have to have a link on this page pointing to another page using "Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for Fake Diploma. I do have the right hand sidebar which contains my most recent posts and some of my titles do include Fake Diploma.
How to make a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma Template
Framing your Fake Diploma
To me theses are separate longtail keywords. While they do include Fake Diploma in them I thought theses were fine because they are not an Exact Match to each other nor are they an Exact Match to “Fake Diploma”. Am I wrong about this?Secondly I reached out on another Forum trying to get a better understanding of this and just got even more confused. I was told that I am also Keyword Stuffing and could be penalized. They said because I have Fake Diploma in most of my article titles that I am Stuffing Fake Diploma. I am in a Niche Market and of course most of my titles include Fake Diploma because that is what my entire site is about. I used the Google Keyword Tool and searched Fake Diploma and it gave me a list of about 79 related keywords like:
Make a Fake Diploma Online
Create a Fake Diploma
Fake Diploma SoftwareThis is just a few of the many that I have. I thought the best way to rank for a keyword was to actually write a post about that Keyword and use it as the title of the article. I am not over using the Keyword in the actual article and I maybe have a Keyword density of about 2-5%. I thought Keyword Stuffing was where you actually used the Keyword like 50 times and also just added random Keywords to the article that did not belong.
Please help me with any insights you can offer. I feel like I am doing all of this completely wrong.
-
The anchor text you use internally doesn't really hold much weight. If you want to rank for that keyword then just use it as your URL and don't worry about the internal anchor text.
As for the meta description, yes you can keep the keyword in there but keep in mind that has no relevance to Google's positioning of your page. Your META description is simply used to entice the reader. Don't attempt to stuff keywords in there. If they fit in naturally (or by 'accident') then fine. If not forget about it. Just make that description read as awesomely as you can. This is what will convince the potential reader to click on your page so it is vital. (Same thing with Titles which are arguably even more important)
In other words, just market it and get people interested in it first. Forget about the search engines. They'll get interested in it if people get interested in it.
Hope this helps.
-
Jesse,
Thank you for your response. I hope you don't mind if I ask you a couple more questions.
Lets use the "Framing your Fake Diploma" example.
So I need to change my titles and for this example "How to Frame your Masterpiece" sounds perfect. But I should still use "Framing your Fake Diploma" in the meta description correct?
As far as internal linking goes, when I am writing new content and it is either appropriate or necessary to link to this article I should use "Framing your Fake Diploma" as my anchor text since I want this page to rank for "Framing your Fake Diploma" correct?
-
5 % keyword density would be a little higher than I'd like, but don't worry too much about these numbers. Honestly just focus on if it reads humanly or not.
In briefly glancing at your site, I gotta admit that the links on the right to the articles seemed stuffed to me and I didn't much love the way it read. I understand that each article is about "fake diplomas" (!! I didn't even know this was a thing, WEIRD!) but there's gotta be a better way to title the articles. It is quite clear what you guys do and not necessary to repeat that in the article's title. Your domain is fake diploma.com... that does it right there. Call an article "How to Frame Your Masterpiece" or something instead. Make it fun, funny, and spice it up a bit.
Otherwise don't worry too much about this recommendation in Moz Pro. A lot of these things are simply that, recommendations but not necessities. You may skate by just fine without changing a thing. That said, it's probably indicative of a usability issue that needs addressing and I think you might be surprised at the success you can gain by re-wording things a bit differently.
Like I said, don't worry about stuffing your main keyword in each of the titles. Everyone is going to know that you make fake diplomas.
Good luck!
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
-
Homepage not ranking for targeted keywords (established site with somewhat ok UR&DR)
Hello everyone, i have a question regarding my homepage issue. My homepage is not showing up in google search result for all the keywords except brand name. I have checked the following things to make sure my homepage is working properly. 1.The page is indexed. 2.No canonical issues 3.No robots.txt issues. 4.Ahrefs UR45 DR55 while my competitors ranking in 2nd and 3rd page have lower UR and DR Have tens of thousands of backlinks but i think most of them are legit I suspect the problem might be the hoempage has more than 70 Anchor text (Internal links) working as directory, and many of them contain the keywords we are targeting. Will that be the reason my homepage is not ranking at all? Since the google might consider it as keyword stuffing and penalize my homepage for that. What are your thoughts on this? Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sufanfeiyan0 -
302 query - can someone help
If I were to put 302s on several reasonably ranked landing pages to drive more traffic/conversions for a period of one week to a particular page, would the pages with 302s drop from their positions in the SERPS? And is this a bad idea? I want to try and drive some conversions over the next month for a particular page… Thanks for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Keyword Stuffing
I am working with a client which has amazing results on Google but his site hits every "no no" to any of the google algros. The site has duplicate content, keyword stuffing, poor content and poor UX. However the site ranks p1 on any of the keyword searches. The site has about 2000 pages all duplicated maybe 1 our 2 words changed. I am a little apprehensive to get him to remove the duplicate contents and remove the keywords stuffing if it means he drops traffic and loses page rank. I have also noticed competition to me rank higher on keywords when they've got a list of keyword and locations i.e web design windsor, web design manchester etc... etc... however they don't seem to get penalised. Is there any accurate tools to check keyword stuffing? and has anyone else experienced this and has any recommendations to tackle this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
How many keywords?
Hi, I have a client asking if they can target 50-100 keywords. Has anyone ever heard of this before? In my eyes, 1-7 keywords at any one time is more than enough. So unless you had a team of 50 people doing the work, is this a reasonable request? Any advice welcome. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA0 -
What's the right way to gain the benefits of an EMD but avoid cramming the title?
Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
Keywords in Google Local results
We have a client in the moving business and I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the "local" results and the number of them that are not following Google's guidelines for Google Local accounts. 3 of them are using exact match keyword strings as their company names. I've reported all 3, every week for the last 2 months and have not seen a single dip in the rankings. Meanwhile our client has a duplicate listing we've verified and "suspended" and it hasn't changed for 4 months! Any tips? I've attached a photo of the listings as well. xwWZWyT.gif
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Black Hat Attack! Seeking Help
Hello, For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack 😞 I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently. Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself. So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site. Questions: 1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack? 2. Should I worry about this? 3. If so, what is the best way to go about this? Would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks in advance! Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd1 -
Stuffing keywords into URLs
The following site ranks #1 in Google for almost every key phrase in their URL path for almost every page on their site. Example: themarketinganalysts.com/en/pages/medical-translation-interpretation-pharmaceutical-equipment-specifications-medical-literature-hippa/ The last folder in this URL uses 9 keywords and I've seen as many as 18 on the same site. Curious: every page is a "default.html" under one of these kinds of folders (so much architecture?). Question: How much does stuffing keywords into URL paths affect ranking? If it has an effect, will Google eventually ferret it out and penalize it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PaulKMia0