Does Google penalise in the way described in this article?

[Ad-Rank]

In an interesting article from January on content cannibalisation: https://ninjaoutreach.com/content-cannibalization-avoid/

there is the following paragraph:

"When the same keyword is used across a number of pages of a single website, Google’s spiders automatically get directed to a page with low-grade quality which in turn results in the low ranking of all the pages on the website."

Is this true? The suggestion here is that they automatically get directed there as a form of penalty. This seems like quite an extraordinary claim!

Can anyone verify?

[LoganRay]

The concept is sound, but their delivery is misleading. Keyword cannibalization is definitely a real thing, you should always avoid targeting the same keyword or topic across multiple pages on the site.

[Linda-Vassily]

That doesn't even make any sense. It implies that somehow the mere presence of multiple pages with the same keyword "automatically" directs Google crawls away from high quality pages (like a convoluted robots.txt or something). And that a low-quality page can bring down a whole website.

I don't think this is what the author was intending--the word choice need a bit of refining...