Keyword Cannibalization Problems?

[danielnash]

Many times intentionally or unintentionally we target one specific keyword on 2 or more pages on same website. Such type of keyword targeting is called keyword cannibalization. This issue can be a cause of having both very less no. keywords or a huge no. of keywords that are to be targetted on a website. It can also be a cause of 2 or more variations of a same keyword. And most of the times site owners and SEOs are unaware of this issue or they are not much bothered about it.

Problems it can cause:

• It forces search engines to choose the best page among different pages which target same keyword/s. basically pages of one single website compete with one another for certain search terms.
• It divides the link juice coming from inbound links into different pages of a website. Consider a few links coming to a certain page with an anchor text and that same anchor text is used to link to other pages (which target the same keyword) as well. These links can be pointed to one single page in ideal situation. And that would be a better and organized scenario as well.
• It creates issues of duplicate content. Though webmasters and site owners keep a check on duplicate content issue but due to keyword canniblization repetitions happen in the content which in the end is not a good sign.

To avoid this problem, a thorough classification of keywords needs to be done and more than that, a well organized site structure or internal linking structure is required.

Please share your information about Keyword Cannibalization

[RyanKempe]

This can be avoided with Rel canonical tags. When 2 or more pages share the same keywords, choose which page should rank and point all other pages to it with the Rel canonical tags. That way you push all the link juice to 1 page, rather than it spreading out over multiple duplicate pages.