Phoenix Website Design – Keyword Cannibalization and its Negative Effects
In the SEO world, people often think that the pages are ranking for specific keywords, the better results or rankings will flourish.
Sadly, no. That is not the case!
Creating more pages ranking for the same keywords will NOT boost your website’s SERPs ranking.
If you do this, you will not gain positive effects. If you continue to target the same keywords through multiple pages, it will bring harm than good. In fact, you are cannibalizing other pages ranking for the same keywords. Thus, calling this practice as keyword cannibalization.
So, what are the effects of Keyword Cannibalization?
Like I said earlier, people think that keyword cannibalization is a good practice. However, they don’t know that it has some dire consequences. I have listed 6 reasons below:
- Less authoritativeness.
Remember, Google values E-A-T. Instead of building a strong authoritative page, you are dividing your resources through creating multiple pages. Yes, you own pages have become your own competitor. These pages ranking for the same keywords will fight for views, traffic, and page ranking.
Take time to get to know E-A-T. For starters, it means Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Also, one way to assess how great your website content is to review Google’s search quality rater guidelines.
- Diminishing the value of links.
Internal links are important to redirect users to other pages in your website. However, if you have multiple pages, you are leading web visitors to various pages. Remember, number 1: you need to build a strong authoritative page. To be honest, you can’t focus on having one authoritative page if there are multiple pages vying for the users’ attention.
- Google may end up diminishing the relevant page.
You see, if there are multiple pages, it’s NOT just the users that will be divided. Search engines like Google will also be confused on what to rank higher.
The worst part? Google will not understand the page and will deem it as irrelevant when it is – in fact – the most relevant out of all your pages. Google has provided a series of questions to help you evaluate your own website content. Refer to: Interpreting “Quality” the Google Way (Part 1) and Interpreting “Quality” the Google Way (Part 2).
If you try to rank for the same keywords, Google might make a mistake in identifying relevant (or irrelevant) pages.
- Wasting away the crawl budget.
Search engine crawlers will not spend all day to scan your website for content. When it notices that you are ranking for same keywords, then, crawlers may see it as not needed. Crawling and indexing pages with the same keywords may be considered as redundant.
- Poor content quality.
Having many pages ranking for the same keywords will inform Google that page content may be too thin. In order to help you with content quality, start with Business SEO: 3 Simple Things to Do on a Weekly Basis.
- Pages won’t be able to convert as much.
Since there are numerous pages competing for attention, it can’t be avoided that some pages will do better than others. Instead of helping the users to go to the right page, you will end up losing leads because they could be redirected to a totally unrelated page.
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