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.
-
Tell your client he is on the right track with wanting to target long tail keywords (that will make his ego feel better) but that it's not so simple as adding one keyword to all the pages. After you choose which page to rank for "oak furniture" (my guess would be the home page or main oak furniture page), choose which long tail phrases containing oak furniture you want to rank for, then choose pages (if different from the main oak furniture page) that would be a good fit. For example, you may have different pages for "discount oak furniture" vs. "taking care of your oak furniture." Do the same with other variations like oak table, oak chair, etc. I would recommend doing this keyword research first and then taking that to the client with a plan of action.
If this is too manual, try using your existing product browsing categories as top-level keywords (so all the oak chairs have "oak chair" in the title, etc). This will get you a bit more granular than just blanketing the site with the broadest possible term. Your client should still be prepared that only one or two pages from the site will rank for that broad of a term.
-
Yes I agree. By all means have something on the general site pages that the company supply "oak furniture", but on the products pages themselves it will be enough to have something like oak sideboard, oak cabinet, oak table etc as appropriate.
Peter
-
Thanks Peter for your Answer.
The issue is there are about 4000 products and having keyword oak furniture adding to each of the product name will cause issues. As i think if i want to rank for keyword oak furniture then 4000 pages will be competing for the word "Oak furniture"
-
Hi Adnan
To answer you firstly on Hummingbird and SEO Guru's opinion, yes, it's correct in part, but your client should not get caught up with idea that responding to Hummingbird requires a new SEO magic trick. Hummingbird is the evolution of what Google has been doing for quite a while meaning that today SEO is not so much about saying how do I target this or that keyword, but rather how you answer the questions your target customers are asking.
So whilst including keywords or phrases into a page Title tag is still relevant, it's not about top loading pages, but making sure the whole page is targeted which actually could mean, in terms of that page's content, that you are targeting multiple key phrases.
You are right in saying you shouldn't just be repeating one key phrase such as "oak furniture" across all pages. A Title tag is like the title of a page in a book. It tells the visitor and the search engine what that page is about which then of course needs to be backed up by the content on that page. So all pages on a site cannot be just about "oak furniture".
Having said that, it may be that your client's site could do with an SEO makeover and as such that may mean updating some page Titles and consequently the page URLs. If that happens, you will need to use 301 redirects to make sure old page URLs are redirected to the new page URLs.
I hope the above helps,
Peter -
Hi Adnan,
If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?
This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.
I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.
The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?
Hope that helps.
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
-
Targeting several keywords at once.
Curious how some of you are able to target several keywords on one same page, for instance for the page www.tutoroo.co/arabic-tutor-dubai we aim to rank first on Google for keywords such as "Arabic tutor" and "Arabic teacher" but also for "learn Arabic" or "learning Arabic". How do you rank up number 1 for several phrase keywords without jeopardizing current rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicolasvhe1 -
How does educational organization schema interact with Google's knowledge graph?
Hi there! I was just wondering if the granular options of the Organization schema, like Educational Organization (http://schema.org/EducationalOrganization) and CollegeOrUniversity (http://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity) schema work the same when it comes to pulling data into the knowledge graph. I've typically always used the Organization schema for customers but was wondering if there are any drawbacks for going deep into the hierarchy of schema. Cheers 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corbec8880 -
Does google ignore ? in url?
Hi Guys, Have a site which ends ?v=6cc98ba2045f for all its URLs. Example: https://domain.com/products/cashmere/robes/?v=6cc98ba2045f Just wondering does Google ignore what is after the ?. Also any ideas what that is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarolynSC0 -
Does location of my VPS and IP adress matter to Google's ranking?
We're busy with adding a German version of our webshop. Right now we're quit successful in The Netherlands with our webshop and SEO. I wonder if Google minds the location of the website (VPS) and IP address concerning SEO for our German webshop. If I Google on this subject I can not find a clear answer. Can somebody help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Makelmail0 -
What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
Hi, 9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places. For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite. I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin1 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
My website keywords have been almost completely taken out of indexing in Google since 04/26/11 and I cannot determine why, anyone know?
I had 12 to 15 1st page Google rankings in the iPhone, iPad, app review vertical. As of 04/26/11 I have lost all rankings, traffic has gone from 1,000 to 1,200 a day to 150 to 350 a day. I was using a plugin for auto press releases, but have removed this and deleted the urls. I also have changed themes and hosting over the last 3 weeks. I have been trying to get SEO help, but cannot seem to get anyone to help me. thank you Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazymikesapps1