SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization
-
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!
-
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)
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
What can you do about negative SEO?
We have a list of 240 domains (look exactly the same) linking to our site for a certain keyword. over 3000 links in total. It means that 50% of our keywords are this keyword and it's not a branded keyword which can affect us in the long term. I have done a WHOIS search and found a name, email and number. Vikas Kumar. I linkedin searched him and found his "legit" SEO site which has EXACTLY the same registration details as the spam sites. I emailed him and he said it would cost 5$ a link removal. I phoned him and he DENIED these emails. He then denied owning these sites etc. We have disavowed them but the anchor text % is still affecting us. Is there anything we can do? I know negative SEO isn't illegal but it's really frustrating. Anyone else had any problems with this type of thing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyB_UK1 -
Quick Question: Is it Bad for SEO to paste from Word to your CMS?
Hey just a quick question I'm having trouble finding a definitive answer to: Is the markup that is transferred from Word docs bad for SEO? We are managing to paste it and it looks fine, but the developers are worried that the extra code will be bad for SEO. Does anyone have solution besides pasting into Text Editor and formatting in the CMS? Is this necessary or can we just leave the extra code? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
SEO Recommendations
For about 3 years our website was number one in Google.co.uk for our trades main keyphrase which resulted in excellent sales. About 12 months ago that position started to slide downwards and for that keyphrase we are now number 10. We are still at number's 1,2 and 3 for several other keyphrases but ones that result in fewer daily Google searches and resultant sales. I have always added unique content to the site but admit that my blog posts became less than daily over the past 12 months. However I am adding posts as often as I can now, of good length and of unique content. As well as tweaking all our online seo factors I'm trying to add good backlinks as often as possible. I wonder if anyone has been in a similar position and what they did to try and regain their previous position? Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Joomla Plugins for SEO
Any input on which Joomla plugins could help us to facilitate the SEO on a client's site? Wordpress has some simple all-in-ones but we're not as familiar with Joomla and it doesn't look like that's the case. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MackenzieFogelson0 -
Canonical tag question
Suppose a site has two pages ( Page A ) and Page B. Both of them have pagerank, but duplicate content. The page A is ranked for keyword "seo india" and page B is ranked for keyword "seo services". If i implement canonical tag on page B, does 1. The pagerank of page B will be transfered to Page A ? 2. Does the site A now ranks for keyword "seo servicies " ( for which Page B was ranking earlier )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Multiple blogs for seo
I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have very high domain PR, 's of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0