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!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can anyone suggest good keywords for this
hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojathakar0 -
Pleasing the Google Gods & Not DeIndexing my site.
Hey Mozzers, So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too. Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website? Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled? Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"? What is every bodies experience with all of this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Website starts ranking on Google then always drops - Targeted for Australia but most traffic from U.S - Bounce Rate at 94.49% - HELP!
Hi everyone, Thank you for your time. During the past 8 months I have been working on this website which is a .com.au . I have fully optimised the website which is targeting Brisbane in Australia and I have setup everything (Sitemaps, Geo location on WMT, Fetched as Google etc..) However the website just does not want to rank at all. I know that the previous SEO company were not too good but since then I have disavowed all unnatural links, we have moved the hosting to a new company and the website content has been updated. Only recently the Website has started ranking for it's brand name (not even in top of Google) and whenever a keyword starts ranking above the Top 50 of Google it suddenly drops again. The other issues is that even if I have setup the website to target Australia the majority of traffic comes from the U.S. Last month out of the 127 Session - 85 from United States - 29 from Australia - 3 Brazil - 2 India - 2 Italy - 1 Canada etc... Because of this the website has a Bounce rate of 95%. If you would have any advice, tips or recommendations that I could do to try and fix this it would be much appreciated. I suppose we can consider this as some kind of penalisation - potentially due to the past work and issues that occurred before the business became our client but I am not sure what more I can do to stop the wrong traffic and improve the rankings. Thanks for your help. Lyam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlphaDigital20 -
301 Redirect Asp.net Help
Hey, we are redesigning the site and we are changing a lot of urls to make them more SEO friendly But some of the old urls have PR 4-5 What is the best way to do about this? How to do a 301 redirect for specific pages in asp.net Or do you recommend something elsE? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Madz0 -
Can image links help improve my backlinking profile?
I recently spent some time looking at the backlink profile of a leading UK food & clothing retailer and noticed that a high number of their backlinks for very competitive search phrase's consisted entirely of image backlinks. 50% of the links contained no alt text and other 50% contained a mix of just the targeted keyword or a phase containig one mention of the targeted keyword. Has anyone had any experiance of this type of marketing producing any positive effect on SEO or search engine rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigJonOne0 -
Keyword Density Question
Here's my hypothetical. I'm working on a car dealer site. And it's a Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer. Would "Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer," count as four keywords rather than one? My goal is to make the website show up for either Chrysler Dealer, Jeep Dealer, et cetera. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template
**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
Confusing penalties
Dear Mozzers, I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page. Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to: eliminate duplicate content improve site structure optimize internal links build legitimate do-follows add some keyword density fix titles and H tags Essentially just the basics, right? But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites. At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it? Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition. Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution? Advice is really appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brevityworks0