Does Google penalise in the way described in this article?
-
In an interesting article from January on content cannibalisation: https://ninjaoutreach.com/content-cannibalization-avoid/
there is the following paragraph:
"When the same keyword is used across a number of pages of a single website, Google’s spiders automatically get directed to a page with low-grade quality which in turn results in the low ranking of all the pages on the website."
Is this true? The suggestion here is that they automatically get directed there as a form of penalty. This seems like quite an extraordinary claim!
Can anyone verify?
-
The concept is sound, but their delivery is misleading. Keyword cannibalization is definitely a real thing, you should always avoid targeting the same keyword or topic across multiple pages on the site.
-
That doesn't even make any sense. It implies that somehow the mere presence of multiple pages with the same keyword "automatically" directs Google crawls away from high quality pages (like a convoluted robots.txt or something). And that a low-quality page can bring down a whole website.
I don't think this is what the author was intending--the word choice need a bit of refining...
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 visibility in Google Discover?
Hey everyone, I run a website that publish articles about pets. I have read some great things about Google Discover and the potential traffic it can bring to publishers (Condé Nast reported up to 20% of traffic coming from Discover in the US, at a certain point). I am currently trying to get indexed and after reading Google guidelines and a Ahrefs guide, I have made many optimizations to my site: structured data, creating an author page, fixing image size and publishing date... so far, it's not working. I feel the lack of a knowledge graph for my business may affect my chances. I'm currently building a GMB page to fix this. Do you have other recommendations or success stories of your own experiments with Discover? An example of an article I tried to get indexed was https://www.lebernard.ca/teletravail-chien-guide-survie/. Obviously, I'm not expecting feedback on the quality of the content since it's in French, but I'm curious if you see anything from a technical perspective that doesn't work. Thanks a lot for your help! Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cheebee1240 -
Links from a penalised site.
Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Any way to force a URL out of Google index?
As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index. I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it. Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed? It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
How do you find synonyms for a word in Google?
Hi, How would you go about finding a connection between words in the eyes of Google? So for example if I enter ~shoes -shoes I get a few things turn up in bold. Boots is one which makes sense and I would assume Google makes a connection between the words so using both in content would help semantically. BUT the other word it bolds is Store - this is where I get lost why would it make this connection unless Google is taking actual query data from users and making a different type of connection between words. How do you find a solid connection between words?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
URL errors in Google Webmaster Tool
Hi Within Google Webmaster Tool 'Crawl errors' report by clicking 'Not found' it shows 404 errors its found. By clicking any column headings and it will reorder them. One column is 'Priority' - do you think Google is telling me its ranked the errors in priority of needing a fix? There is no reference to this in the Webmaster tool help. Many thanks Nigel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5551 -
Link from archived article.
A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
Hello all, think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything. You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models. How would you make both of them live together in your website? If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions). In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antorome1