Keyword cannibalization
-
Hi,
I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization.
1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations.
The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...).
My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page?
Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content.
Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three?
2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related?
In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans?
In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization?
Looking forward to your comments!
-
Hi,
Thanks for the answer and sorry for the late response.
I understand what you mean, but I still have the following question: there is no possibility to add extra content to the blog category pages, unless through source code. This means I can not add extra text on these pages, so these blog category pages just sum up all the different blog articles of which the titles are H2's. Will these pages ever rank, because it is not really unique content about one subject?
Thanks!
-
I am a Cannibal.
For an important keyword, two pages of substantive, useful and valuable content is better than one. Both of them will often appear within the SERPs and each of them can be optimized for different keyword variants and different searcher intents. Develop ways to link these pages to one another in ways that are obvious and usefully presented to the visitor.
All of this substantive, useful and valuable content can show visitors that you are The Man for this product or this product category.
Sometimes I have numerous pages of substantive, useful and valuable content for one keyword. Sales page, how to use it page, parts and accessories page, maintenance and repair page, comparison of product variants page. All of these link to each other. Where competition is moderate to low I can have two or more pages on the first SERP.
There is nothing wrong about being a cannibal if you do it with substantive, useful and valuable content.
Are you trying to run your competitor out of town or are you farting around?
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
-
Linking to own homepage with keywords as link text
I recently discovered, that previous SEO work on a client's website apparently included setting links from subpages to the homepage using keywords as link text that the whole website should rank for. i.e. (fictional example) a subpage about chocolate would link to the homepage via "Visit the best sweet shop in Dallas and get a free sample." I am dubious about the influence this might have - anybody with any tests? I also think that it is quite weird when considering user friendliness - at least I would not expect such a link to take me to the homepage of the very site I was just on, probably browsing in a relevant page. So, what about such links: actually helpful, mostly don't matter or even potentially harmful? Looking forward to your opinions! Nico
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Keyword Stuffing - Ecommerce websites
Hey Mozzers, Im undertaking a content audit and its going very well, we have written some better content for the first set of pages, it still needs some improvement but we have a good base and starting point from which we can make an SEO log and work on it over time. For the content I used the following formula for how many times to include a keyword Word Count / Length of Keyword. (eg. 600 words / 3 word keyword = 200). Then 1-4% of this (2-8 times). This has worked well for me in the past and has been a good base guide. I have ran the pages through Moz optimiser and every single page hit an A for keyword page optimisation. However many of the pages failed on keyword stuffing, which obviously has high priority. My dilemma is that, moz counts 15 as the cut off for keyword stuffing with the written text we have done really well with using it a set number of times. But these pages are product category pages. The keyword in the extreme of cases is listed 7-9 times in the side nav menu. 7-9 times in the product category listings. Take for example *** it is optimised for thermometers (i know it a tough single word keyword, and we have fairly modest aims with it, im using it here for example purposes). The word is used a good number of times within the article but is sent through the roof with the links to the sub categories. This page for example mentions the keyword 30 times. Can anybody suggest any ways to improve on this? Is how we display the categories in the nav bar and in the page excessive? As always many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Keyword rich internal linking - problem?
Had an interesting situation today.. We write daily news articles on our site. In each article we link out to two sources that we are writing about (credible sources) and we do one or two internal links. For example.. 'Today McDonald's have announced that they are purchasing more blue widgets in order to increase their opportunity to appeal to a larger market.' So in that sentence you can see one outbound link and one inbound to blue widgets on our site. I got an email today from a large company who we have written an article about in the industry and they have asked me to remove the link to their site.. I actually asked them why and this was their response. 'We're concerned because of the number of keyword-rich internal links in the article, and are worried that being included alongside them might be misinterpreted by Google as an artificial link.' Fristly, do they really have anything to be worried about?.. but more importantly, with our internal linking, do we have anything to be worried about?.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Google’s Hummingbird and Keyword Cannibalization
My client wants to have keywords added on every product with the product name , apparently some seo guru told him that hummingbird is all about key phrases and long tail keywords. As i know hummingbird lends to understand the intent and contextual meaning of the query. The issue is if I add the keywords on for e.g oak furniture on all of my product title,And we are using zen-cart platform and it will change the internal anchor text on the product listing page. It will cause a Cannibalization issue. Question1. I just need help to reply to client that adding keyword can cause detrimental to ranking. Question 2. If i am wrong then do we need to re optimise the site. I have read http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adnan.Hassan.Khan0 -
Meta Keywords Good or Bad
Hi All, I've been reading more about the meta keyword tag and why it may not be a good idea to include them on pages and am looking for thoughts/feedback on this idea. If you have employed this tactic, can you give me some insight into any results you saw. If you decided to not employ this tactic, why did you choose not to? I wan to understand all sides of this before employing any changes to my company's websites. Thank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | airnwater0 -
Correct strategy for long-tail keywords?
Hi, We are selling log houses on our website. Every log house is listed as a "product", and this "product" consists of many separate parts, that are technically also products. For example a log house product consists of doors, windows, roof - and all these parts are technically also products, having their own content pages. The question is - Should we let google index these detail pages, or should we list them as noindex? These pages have no content, only the headline, which are great for long-tail SEO. We are probably the only manufacturer in the world who has a separate page for "log house wood beam 400x400mm". But otherwise these pages are empty. My question is - what should we do? Should we let google index them all (we have over 3600 of them) and maybe try to insert an automatic FAQ section to every one of them to put more content on the page? Or will 3600 low-content pages hurt our rankings? Otherwise we are ranking quite well. Thanks, Johan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
What to do with keyword specific domains
I have a few domain names with the keywords I'm trying to target for my website. My website currently has been in operations for a couple years, and while not hugely authoritative, has built some value. Now, are these domain names with keywords any use to me? Is there any point to forward them to my site? Do I try to build up a page (or a few of content) and then have a link to my main site? Any insight would be mucho appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregalam0 -
Optimising a website for multiple keywords and multiple towns
Hello, We have a clients site who we are trying to rank for 10 keywords accross 20 towns so a combination of 200. What would be the best way to tackle this. Their url is www.abbottclarkeifa.co.uk. Thanks Shehzad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gareth_Cartman0