Guilty of keyword cannibalization. What's the best way to fix it without losing link juice?
-
Hi guys,
I'm new here but I already spent hours reading the forums. I didn't post before because I didn't feel the need to, but today it's different. I don't want to take fixing steps that are not optimal for my website situation.
So here's the problem :
I am working on an affiliate website that is growing day after day and is already profitable. It is not by any mean a thin affiliate site. It's a french language website with product reviews on it.
Right now there is 1 main page (hero page) per review in which I describe the products, put affiliate links, present useful information, etc. These pages have a good word count and I am targeting 1-2 main keywords on them which I consider a good practice.
Couple of months ago I decided to add a product page for each one (normally it's 5 products per review) so I added 5 more page per review, targeting product names as new keywords. Problem is that :
- Product names are very similar to the main keywords (keyword cannibalization problem)
- There is very little added information on the product page when you compare it to the hero page (too thin)
- A lot of information is repeated on each of the product pages. I think this is bad.
So I decided to keep only the hero pages to keep more link juice, avoid keyword cannibalization, improve page authority and get more content on one single page (only information that was not repeated have been added to hero page). I removed ALL THE LINKS to product pages (from the hero page).
So now for my questions :
- Is it better to keep the product pages in my sitemap or to delete them right away?
- Is it better to let the product pages die by themselves over time or to 301 redirect all the product pages to hero page to keep link juice?
- The next question is a bit more complicated. Hope you guys understand what I mean. Considering that product pages are now gone, this will for sure weaken my bounce rate % because only hero page with good/deep information will be accessible to visitors (there is not a lot of internal links in each review, except to other, RELATED reviews). Is setting up goals in google analytics + telling google that it should consider a click on an affiliate link as a NEW PAGE VIEW (like it would act for a click on a link of a product on my own domain) will help for SERPs and SEO?? Or it will just help ME to see a lower bounce rate and setting goals? In other words, is tracking these links and let google see them as new pages clicks will help for the page rankings or not? Because from what I am understanding, a good bounce rate helps for rankings.
- If the changes made to avoid keyword cannibalization work, when could I potentially see the effects/benefits in the SERPs and trafic?
-
I would 301 redirect the product pages to the hero pages they best represent. I would not let them 404 you could loose valuable traffic that way.
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 do I easily no-follow my affiliate links?
Hi, I am in the process of setting up an affiliate marketing campaign for my site. I have done a bit of research and understand that it is safest in terms of SEO to add no-follow to the links from the affiliate sites. What is the easiest and simplest way to implement this?
Affiliate Marketing | | whiteonlySEO2 -
URL with affiliate ID won't stop outranking our homepage. Time for nuclear option?
We have affiliate links applied to our index URL - https://playon.co - which are not picked up as a duplicate URLs by Google. We've applied a canonical URL, but our homepage is a 301 redirect to a page with a language parameter. So what happens is: https://playon.co/ goes to https://playon.co/en Affiliate links such as https://playon.co/#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d go to https://playon.co/en#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d This gets picked up as rel="canonical" href="https://playon.co/en" which I assumed marked it as a non-canonical page. Nonetheless, we keep seeing this affiliate "page" ranking - even above our own homepage for some terms. Worse, the affiliate URL also contains old cached information of the page. I don't even see how these SERP results should exist, because the affiliate link just ends up at the homepage (https://playon.co/en) My questions: What can we do to remove these affiliate URL versions of our homepage from being ranked? Google doesn't see anything after the hash in the indexed affiliate URLs. If we were to no-index our index URL (https://playon.co/) to completely remove the affiliates links, would our canonical version (https://playon.co/en) assume the top listing, or will we have effectively nuked our entire site? Appreciate any help.
Affiliate Marketing | | jmoreland0 -
Setting up external link goals in GA
I have recently switched all my travel affiliate links to TripAdvisor using their javascript code that converts the natural links (direct links to TA URLs) to affiliate links. I have set up goal tracking in GA to try to put a monetary value on clicks through to these links (based on the known conversion rate to commissionable bookings) but GA is over-reporting the goals by a very large margin. I'm wondering what I've done wrong. The first screen shot below is of the goal settings I used in GA. The second screenshot shows that GA is reporting 7125 goal completions since I set up the goal on 7 August. The third screenshot shows the actual number of GA events recorded on outbound clicks to TA URLs in the same period, which is just 97. So the goal completions being recorded far exceed the actual goal completions, but I'm not sure why. I know I've done something wrong but as this is the first time I've used goals, I'd appreciate some help to see what I've done wrong. Thank you. 3f7dc3de6f9f1373d47994144a5cb016 56aa39130a7d54b07d8f2ce9cf1d7fb0 35ee827275928ca8c4d4c941f0672ef8
Affiliate Marketing | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
What is the best way to boost no. of quality sites linking in?
Analysing my site ranking compared to competitors, I see that our weakness is getting others to share our content and link into it via their own blogs and social media - although I would say our social media activity is pretty good. We have also worked on getting listed free on relevant sites related to our product area (learn spanish in spain) in order to increase sites linking but this is still minute compared to our 2 main competitors. (As a note: paid listings are not totally justifiable for us at this point in time but perhaps in the future we will expand on this). Am I missing something here?
Affiliate Marketing | | sparkit0 -
Best way to start affiliate marketing a new mens magazine website?
I have just started up a new mens magazine website featuring articles, videos, sports news and photos to help drive traffic to the website. I write all the articles myself and do the social media updates in my spare time. I was wondering if anyone has any tips on the best way to start doing affiliate marketing for a new website? I was inspired to do this by successful internet marketers who make a passive income off their websites. So far I have added Amazon and William Hill as affiliate links as I think my target market will be looking for these types of product links. Also, for anyone who has experience in this, how long it taken for your blog to become successful and make money? Many thanks, Alex
Affiliate Marketing | | AlexBarnes0 -
Affilate Links
Hi I’m looking for confirmation of my worries about affiliate links to a website I'm working for and hopefully get some ideas of how to solve the problem of having affiliates without losing the strength of links from affiliate web sites. Poplidays.com has an affiliate program with an independant affiliation platform, but it also has a couple of partners who link directly to Poplidays.com from their sites. Poplidays wants to reward the partner sites in the same way as it does affiliates: with a percentage of sales generated by visitors. However as their SEO I don’t want to lose these links. They are from established, quality sites in the same subject area and, in my opinion, have a lot of SEO value. Affiliate links are 302 redirects from urls on the affiliation platform’s domain; something like http://poplidays.affiliation.com/?clientid=123 to www.poplidays.com Can you confirm that replacing a direct link to www.poplidays.com with a 302 redirect of this type will be a bad for Poplidays rankings? Any proof of this from a reliable source that I can quote? The affiliation platform is insisting that there is no negative effect and that no one has ever made a remark like mine before. Any good ideas of how to resolve the problem of rewarding linkers without spoiling the links for SEO? Bearing in mind that Poplidays want to be able to reward sites for visitors who may buy on a later interaction with the site (up to 30-days) and want an automatic report so that the partner can follow his commissions. I’ve tried implementing something through Google Analytics but it wasn’t perfect. Your in house affiliation system is working with links like http://go.seomoz.org/aff_c?offer_id=1&aff_id=1624&url_id=1&file_id=24 that 302 to http://www.seomoz.org/features?affid=1624&txnid=10274208218121120514 Is this a better / perfect solution ? Compared to a direct link to http://www.seomoz.org/features ? Thanks - Neil
Affiliate Marketing | | CarmenImmobilier0 -
Affiliate links and Panda
Hello all, my question relates to the recent panda changes and the subsequent impact on pages with affiliate links. I have a hub of pages on my website talking about parcel delivery. Each page has unique, quality content and up until about 3 weeks ago they were starting to achieve strong rankings. We then decided to add some affiliate links (just 3) on each of the 5 parcel related pages we have. The rankings for each of these pages have tanked completely; rather than top 20, we're now outside of the top 100 for all of them. When we noticed this we masked the link, changing it to domain.com/index/affiliate; we also no followed the link. Alas this has had minimal effect in restoring the rankings. What i'm now thinking of doing is removing the affiliate links from the parcel landing pages altogether and instead providing users with a no followed link to another page within the site upon which we would have the affiliate links. This page would also be no indexed as well. My question is: Is this a good idea and if so will it restore my previous rankings over time, or have those pages (as a result of the affiliate links) been permanently down graded?? Any assistance would be gratefully received!
Affiliate Marketing | | danielparry0