Keyword Self-Cannibalization Concern

[JerDoggMckoy]

Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.

[JerDoggMckoy]

Thank you everyone for the help. I feel confident that we can just continue on like we are, and if I notice any issues, then I can try your suggestions of the keyword order and also following the examples of that blog post. Thanks again!

[randfish]

Great discussion and suggestions here already, but I wanted to add this post in case you haven't seen it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page

There's lots of good stuff in the comments there, too.

[Getz.pro]

The idea here is conception. Google will conceptually see the difference between an elephant and a baby elephant as being two different items.

Although it should see your products as different, the warning comes from page apparently being the same- no distinction.

If you find you are not ranking well, or more so, someone slipping inside your ranking, try 400W NextGen Digital Ballast and 600W NextGen Digital Ballast

I do agree with EGOL that for a few pages this should not be that big of a deal, but changing the order of keywords here should not be either.

I hope that helps

[JerDoggMckoy]

Thanks for the response EGOL. Right now we have 3 different brands of digital ballasts. We have our main digital ballasts category, then we have NextGen, Phantom & Lumatek digital ballasts, and each of those all have the NextGen 400w digital ballast, the Phantom 400W digital ballast, the Lumatek 400w digital ballast, also for 600w and 1000w.

Where I get confused, the example of the on page optimization states that if you are trying to rank for elephants, then you can use "baby elephants" as a different page. Isn't this what I'm essentially doing then? I have digital ballasts, but then they are also broken down into 400w digital ballasts, 600w digital ballasts, NexttGen 400w digital ballasts, Lumatek 1000w digital ballasts, etc.

[EGOL]

It depends upon how many very similar pages you are going to have.  If you have dozens or more then a cannibalization potential is very real.  However, if you only have two, three, four then that gives you the potential to have multiple pages in the SERPs.  Nothing like having #1, #2, #3 and #4 for a query.

For small numbers it is more of an opportunity than a problem.