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
-
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Keyword research
Hi, When you do keyword research and my terms is SEO for example. Do I need in the content to have the word "SEO" by itself and then a related keyword like "SEO tools" as 2 separate keywords or can I have "SEO tools" only and will this be counted as 2 separate keyword. The 1 st one will be "SEO" and the other one will be "SEO tools." Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google Indexing Stopped
Hello Team, A month ago, Google was indexing more than 2,35,000 pages, now has reduced to 11K. I have cross-checked almost everything including content, backlinks and schemas. Everything is looking fine, except the server response time, being a heavy website, or may be due to server issues, the website has an average loading time of 4 secs. Also, I would like to mention that I have been using same server since I have started working on the website, and as said above a month ago the indexing rate was more than 2.3 M, now reduced to 11K. nothing changed. As I have tried my level best on doing research for the same, so please if you had any such experiences, do share your valuable solutions to this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffreyjohnson0 -
Keyword Cannibalization
Good morning everybody! I have a page in my web site that it's optimized for two specific keywords. At the same time, in the same web site it exists an other page better optimized for one of this keyword, that it would obtain a better position in search engine. The problem is the famous "Keyword Cannibalization", Can you help me with any suggestion to address Google through this defined page when people searches this keyword. Thanks, Giulia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DByers0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
Is it better to use geo-targeted keywords or add the locations as separate keywords?
For example... state keyword (nyc real estate) or keyword, state (nyc, real estate) = 2 keywords Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyclone0