Keyword cannibalization isn’t an issue that’s in the SEO forums much, nor is it something that many SEOs feature prominently in site reviews (at least, from my experience), but it can be detrimental to potential rankings for several different reasons. First, I’ll illustrate how keyword cannibalization happens.
It typically starts when a website’s information architecture calls for the targeting of a single term or phrase on multiple pages of the site. Many times this is done unintentionally, but results in several or even dozens of pages that have the same keyword target in the title and header tags. I’ve heard several clients explain the logic behind this in a similar fashion:
Client: I want Google to know my site is about “Plaid Checkered Pants” so I made that the title of every page.
Wahid: Really?…
Client: I want people to link to me with “Plaid Checkered Pants” in the anchor text, so I used that on every page.
Wahid: I see…
Client: I want as many chances as possible to rank well for “Plaid Checkered Pants” so I stuffed it on every page.
Wahid: Here we go again…
Here’s the problem:
Google (and the other search engines) will spider the pages on your site and see 4 (or 40) different pages on the site all seemingly relevant to one particular keyword (in this example – “snowboards”). Contrary to the belief of my three fictitious clients above, Google doesn’t interpret this as meaning that your site as a whole is more relevant to “snowboards” or should rank higher than the competition. Instead, it forces Google to choose between the many versions and pick one it feels best fits the query. There’s a number of rank-boosting features you lose out on when this happens:
- Internal Anchor Text – since you’re pointing to so many different pages with the same subject, you can’t concentrate the value of internal anchor text on one target.
- External Links – If 4 sites link to one page on “snowboards,” 3 sites link to another of your “snowboard” pages and 6 sites link to yet another “snowboard” page, you’ve split up your external link value among three pages, rather than consolidating it into one.
- Content Quality – After 3 or 4 pages of writing about the same primary topic, the value of your content is going to suffer. You want the best possible single page to attract links and referrals, not a dozen bland, replicated pages.
- Conversion Rate – If one page is converting better than the others, it’s a waste to have multiple, lower-converting versions targeting the same traffic. If you want to do conversion tracking, use a multiple-delivery testing system (either A/B or multivariate).
So what’s the solution?
The difference in this example is that instead of targeting the singular “snowboards” on every page, the pages are focused on unique, valuable variations and all of them link back to an original, canonical source for the singular term. Google can now easily identify the most relevant page for each of these queries. This isn’t just valuable to the search engines; it’s also a far better user experience and overall information architecture.
What should you do if you’ve already got a case of keyword cannibalization? Employ 301’s liberally. When working with clients, I like to ID all the pages in the architecture with this issue and determine the best page to point them to, then use a 301 on every cannibalizing page to a single version. This not only ensures that visitors all arrive at the right page, but that the link equity and relevance built up over time is directing the engines to the most relevant and highest-ranking-potential page for the query.
BTW – No making fun of my robot guy. He may not be perfect, but he’s the best I can do at midnight.
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Keywords are gateways through which your website is going to be visited from search engines users, those visitors can be filtered by keywords. Every single keyword or phrase has its target audience, in fact you can evaluate your visitors through keywords such as your visitor’s mind set, psychology, type, age group, interest and intension. If you have selected wrong keywords for your website, it could hurt your eBusiness badly.
What is a Keyword or Phrase?
A keyword or phrase is a single or group of words which is used to construct a search statement to find information by search engine users. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites.
Keywords are Gateway of Your eBusiness!
It really doesn’t matter how good your SEO Practices are? Or how good your SEO Strategy is? If you are failed to get right kind of traffic at your website. Keywords are the gateway for any website on internet, and with wrong keywords success can never be achieved.
Wrong Keyword or Phrase
There can be many definitions of wrong keywords, such as a wrong keyword or phrase is a keyword or phrase which is irrelevant with services or products of website, which has poor conversion of visitors into paying customers, and which is failed to bring targeted and focused traffic to website.
Wrong Keywords are not Bad Keywords
Wrong keywords are invaluable keywords for any website, they don’t have any worth for website, whereas bad keywords are those which are not searched or hardly searched by search engine users.
Why Waste Quality Time on Wrong Keywords?
Selecting wrong keyword or phrase is the biggest mistake for any SEO campaign, even if you have achieved top ranking on those wrong keywords, it will be waste of your energy and efforts. All your efforts are going to lead you no where if you have a wrong direction, keywords set directions for your efforts, selecting them in quick time will end up giving you nothing. Time is the real money, keywords can be updated anytime but what to do with the time spent on promoting wrong keywords, it’s just wasted. One can get frustrated if doesn’t have desirable results specially in the initial stage for any website, that’s why it doesn’t matter how much time you spent on selecting keywords but make sure that you select the best keywords.
Why Wrong Keywords are selected?
Majority of wrong keywords have good search counts, because they are comparatively search better than specific keywords, that’s why they get selected sometimes by website owner or by SEOs. But results come up after the first quarter or session when they failed to boast sales or right kind of traffic. It’s not the traffic that makes a keyword or phrase wrong it’s the conversion that makes it wrong.
Keywords Lead Your Website to Success!
These are the keywords which lead your website a successful eBusiness or eCommerce business, they can lead you to hell too, you have to be very careful selecting them, after all you or your assigned marketers are going to put their all efforts to bring your website on top of those keywords.
Specific and Focused Keywords will pay you!
Why get crazy of traffic and ask for everything, for example if you provide search engine optimization services then you should select keywords like “seo services, search engine optimization services, seo outsourcing, seo outsourcing”. And you should avoid selecting keywords like “seo or search engine optimizer”, because people typing “seo or search engine optimizer” may be searching for freelance seo or searching for definition of seo and won’t be interested in your services, they will come to your website and go without making any purchase.
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Google is great! We all know that and except it by all means, whatever Google produces it’s 100% successful tool / product, “adwords keyword tool” is one of the tools that Google has launched, there are some confusions related to this tool, how reliable this tool is? Is this tool for organic searches too? I’ll elaborate them and explain my personal experience with it.
What is Google Keyword Tool?
After the successful launch of Google adwords in 2000, Google realizes the need of a keyword tool that will help PPC advertisers to build or refine their keyword lists and review keywords popularities and performances information in advance before going live, that’s why Google has launched its “Google Keyword Tool”
Keyword Tool Features like “Site related keywords, Keywords Performance Statistics, Synonyms, Cost and Estimated Ad Positions” are available in Google keyword tool.
Why Google Shows Junk Keywords by its Keyword Tool?
Google will be in a better position to answer this question, as far as my little knowledge is concern, Google has global audience and when it comes to serve everybody you have all types of inputs, same thing happens with Google, it welcomes everybody and is prepared to serve in its style, there is nothing bad in it, but Google makes this kind of information available through Google Keyword Tool, as a result we get to see some rubbish or junk keywords.
Google Never says Keyword Tool is for Organic Search
Google never gives any statement related to reliability of its keyword tool and using Google keyword tool for organic is not a good idea, since we’ve practical experience of plenty of keywords, which bring thousands of visitors to our website from Google but Google gives no hint related to those keywords, in fact when we searched those keywords, few have no suggestions, and few have very less volume of searches.
Why Google Doesn’t Show Great Keyword? Is Google Cheating?
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Is Google ready to share its own information with world? That’s really one of the concerning point for all of us, what’s hurting Google to show its information? Is Google afraid of Yahoo or Msn?
Google must be having very useful and exact information related to keywords, keywords search frequency, quality, audience type, behavior and keywords effectiveness, since Google is biggest search engine in the world, and it shares more than 57% of overall search engine visitors. We get to have very useful information from our small sites, you can have an idea of the information Google has related to world.
Google is Unable to Share its Real Information
Even though Google is not afraid of Yahoo, Msn and Ask but somehow they are healthy competitors, as smart player Google will never let its competitor know what kind of traffic is there at Google? What are the most searched keywords? Which keywords are costly? This type of information is very critical and if Yahoo or Msn has this information, with no time they can give Google a very tough time. We all know Microsoft has been trying very hard to get close to Google and Microsoft has the capability to do that.
Google privacy is its success! I don’t say that Google is cheating us, it’s not giving rubbish data at all, but Google mixes the rubbish with quality data together and it never shows its most searched keywords.
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