Keyword Targeting / Cannibalisation

[GaryVictory]

Hi Guys

We're about to launch a very large website for a flooring company and would like to find out more about _key word _cannibalisation - to put my mind at rest. I know Rand posted a Whiteboard Friday early last year about this topic and mentioned using part of the same keyword was ok to use.

All our keywords are specifically geared for "user intent" meaning each keyword has relevance and the content to back up the keyword. We've ensured the keywords are located within each url, placed at the start of the page title, h1 etc.

[GaryVictory]

Hi Steve

Having unique content for each product page is a must! I guess sofa beds are individually unique to a degree in terms of brand, size, functionality, design etc.

If you could elaborate about what it is exactly you are trying to do, I'll try to help?

Gary

[DoingMyBest]

Hi there

I am an Ecommerce manager and I find the whole keyword cannibalisation topic fascinating.

We sell furniture - beds, sofa beds, dining tables, chairs etc.

I am trying to add value to each product description - as much important and factual information as possible - as opposed to superlatives etc

We have about 12 sofa beds and I am working at each sofa bed targeting specific keywords so that they don't compete for the same keywords.

In regards to the keyword "sofa beds", I am working at this keyword being more dominant within the category page.

In the modern SEO context, I would love to know if this is the right approach?

Steve

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Gary, Samuel has raised some good questions. Did you see his response? Let us know, thanks!

Christy

[SamuelScott]

Gary, thanks for the question. Based on the little that I've seen here, I would worry more about a Panda penalty than keyword cannibalization.

Here's the history in a basic nutshell. Years ago, webmasters would aim to have one page target one keyword. There would be one page for "red t-shirts," one for "green t-shirts," and so on. All of the text on those pages would be exactly the same -- except that "red or "green" may change based on the page. In such a context, webmasters did not want to have keyword cannibalization -- if the word "green" was used on the page for "red t-shirts," then Google might not know which page to rank for each desired term.

However, this created bloated websites with many more pages than were actually needed. Does a t-shirt website really need 50 pages (one for each color) when only one would be enough (and then the visitor could choose which color to buy)? In Google's eyes, such websites created bad user experiences -- and Google wants to eliminate bad user experiences.

So, in case you don't know, Google's Panda penalty targets websites that -- among other issues -- have a lot of "thin" or "duplicated" content such as in the t-shirt example above. (You can see more information in this Moz post by Cyrus.)

Before going further, I would have to ask you some questions: Does you website really need a separate page for each and every single one of those topics? Are the products really that entirely different? Are the text and images on each page completely different and unique -- in other words, does each page offer true value to the visitor, or are you just trying to rank highly in Google straight away as in the t-shirt example?

If many of those pages above are on similar topics, then you may want to have one page per topic (rather than per keyword) where by each topic consists of a group of related keyword phrases -- see this Whiteboard Friday on modern, semantic SEO for more information.

Please let me know your thoughts, and I'd be happy to respond further!