SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization

[CEDRSolutions]

I know about Keyword Cannibalization, so I understand why it's generally a problem.  If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google has to "guess" which one to display (as I understand it, unless you have a SUPER influential page you won't get both pages showing up on the SERP).

To explain why I'm not sure if this applies to our page, we have a blog that we write about employment law issues on.  So we might have 20 blog posts over the past year that all talk about recent pregnancy discrimination lawsuits employers might be interested in.

Now, searching the Google Keyword tools, there aren't even close to 20 different focus keywords that would make any sense.  "Pregnancy Discrimination lawsuit" is niche enough for us to be competitive, but anything more specific than that simply has very little search activity.

My suggestion is to just optimize all of them for "pregnancy discrimination lawsuit".  My understand of how Panda works is that if the content is different on each page (and it is!) then it will only display what it guesses is the most relevant "NLRB" post, but any link juice sent to the other 19 "NLRB" posts would still boost the relevancy for whatever post Google chooses. And it wouldn't get dinged as keyword stuffing because it's clearly not just the same page repeated over and over.

I've found quite a few articles on Keyword Cannibalization but many are pre-Panda. I was CERTAIN I'd seen a post that explained my idea is a totally viable and good one, but of course now I can't find it.  So before I go full steam ahead with this strategy I just want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing.  Thanks!

[CEDRSolutions]

Well, I will certainly look into that.

Really though, just in the meantime, I'm very curious if someone could at least make a call as to which of these two procedures works better

-  Find a way to SEO optimize 20 variations of similar pages covering a similar topic (but different enough that all 20 need to stay)

-  SEO optimize each of the 20 pages for the same keyword

I have searched everywhere, I cannot find a cogent answer as to whether cannibalization would happen in option 2, or if it would pretty much work (although again, your idea is way better, I'm not suggesting my procedure would work nearly as well)

[EGOL]

We won't have time to get new category pages up probably for at least a few months

I try to avoid stopgap work.  If I was in your situation, I would plan this well and execute once.  I would wait until the site move is over and then do a great job.

As for optimizing the case study pages.  I would look at the traffic coming into them now and what keywords might be sending it.  I don't think that the optimization of these pages is extremely critical.  I would simply give them obvious and relevant names.

[CEDRSolutions]

First of all, thank you for the kind words regarding our content.  We've worked hard to build up a good amount of it (and make it quality stuff), now we're just trying to leverage it better.

I immediately see tons of great uses for your idea, we could 301-redirect dead pages back to that even (if we needed to, we're in the middle of a site move and still trying to figure out if we should port over ALL of our content, some of the earlier stuff isn't quite as strong)

Because we're limited on time, let me just get clarification on two things in the meantime:

#1.  We won't have time to get new category pages up probably for at least a few months, there's too much other website optimizing stuff to do before our deadline. Would the procedure I outlined work, or would it cause problems? I realize it wouldn't work as well as yours, it's just a stopgap until then.

#2.  If we're really going to NEED to do it the way you described (because my way actively hurts us somehow), we would still try to SEO optimize the actual articles that people link to, correct?  With a link back to the category page (and appropriate anchor text) I know we'd still be boosting the category page every time someone visits an article page, but if we have to SEO optimize the article too (and if we can't repeat keywords) then we're back at square 1, trying to optimize more-or-less the same keyword 20 different ways.

[EGOL]

In my opinion, you seem to have an awesome library of content on this subject.

So, what I would do is prepare a special page that will serve as a category page for this topic.  I would, at the top of that page, describe the general topic, the background of what employers should know, then explain how you have prepared detailed summaries of many different cases.   A summary of your service to this type of client would be included on this page.

Then, I would give a name to each case, a one or two sentence description, and link to the page where the full details of that case can be found. This page will be a gateway to your library and because it links out to lots of resource material on your site it should become your master page on this topic to rank at the top of the SERPs.

I would title this page with a very short title tag, not much more than your keywords and the name of your firm.  Then, across the website in persistent navigation I would link to this page.

One problem with blogs is they often don't weave into the topic structure of your website with breadcrumbs or persistent navigation.  So if you don't have that, you might want to develop it or at least give links back to the main category page within each blog post with keyword anchor text.  I might create a colored box that directs any visitor to each blog post  to your full category page.

This will be a hand-built category page targeted at your main keyword.  This is what I use when I am mounting a massive content attack on a difficult keyword.