Is your site suffering from keyword cannibalization? It does happen sometimes when the same keyword or keyphrase is targeted on multiple pages of the website, that can possibly have a negative effect on your rankings. What happens is that the search engines are served multifold choices for the patricular keywords and hence is forced to pick and choose whichever it feels is the best fit. This is a classic case of limiting to a great degree the search potential of your website. It is poor form really, putting all eggs in one basket and not being able to levearge the long tail of search.
Best Practices to avoid Keyword Cannibalization
- Page Specific Keyword Focus
Follow the Mantra of having primary keywords for each page, not more than a couple to ensure that you can optimize it well, both on and off page. A well planned out information architecture for your website would go a long way in helping this pan out properly. - Help Google zero on the authority pages
Make sure you focus on unique variations of keywords/keyphrases for every page and ensure that they all point their link juice to the de facto original page for that keyphrase. This easily gives a legup to the search engine where to find the authority page for the keyterm is. - Meet good meta data standards
Ensure that you have unique meta tags and descriptions for each of your pages. Home page and category pages can have the broad competitive keywords and let the inner level page/ deeper pages mine the long tail of search. - 301′ your way back to sanity
If you do suffer from keyword cannibalization, get smart and liberal with 301 redirects and ensure all cannibalizing pages head to the single authority version. You not just build link equity over time but also give your authority page its best shot of achieving its defined goals.