37% of global marketing budgets are spent on content, but a huge proportion of this is going to waste. Internal keyword cannibalisation is one of the major issues, if not the single major issue that affects search engine positions.

You may think that you have everything in place for optimisation: links, headers and quality content etc., but it doesn’t take much for cannibalisation to occur, and when it does it can hamper your sites visibility and performance hugely.

The 4 types of Cannibalisation:

I have identified the 4 main types of cannibalisation which could affect all of your digital assets. These frameworks are all united by duplicate theming.

1) Internal keyword cannibalisation

Keyword Cannibalisation is when two or more pages within your site are competing for the same search term. The conflict occurs when there is duplicate theming and Google cannot determine which page should appear for the given search term.

2) Subdomain cannibalisation

In the same way that no sector is safe from internal cannibalisation, sites that use a subdomain structure could face subdomain cannibalisation.

A subdomain strategy is a clear way of categorising content or allocating departments their own space on the root domain. For example, the gambling sector use it almost ubiquitously with sport.example.com or news.example.com, as their company makeup is stringently divided by separate P&Ls and marketing budgets.

 

Subdomain cannibalisation can occur when different departments focus on similar content and search terms. The solution lies in interdepartmental communication and content strategy.

3) International cannibalisation

Google will penalise a site if it has duplicate content across different TLDs. This is most noticeable across sites with the same language, for example: UK, US, Canada, Ireland, and Australia.

The UK user, for example, won’t want to see dollars when they are paying for a product; they’ll simply go elsewhere. This lack of foresight may seriously affect business.

In this instance, the problem is a lack of unified strategy for regional content differentiation.
Another issue may be that one nation's digital team simply doesn't implement the relevant hreflang tags. This could serve to pull both nation’s sites down in the SERPs.

In essence, a local country subfolder approach, supported by rel=alternate tagging, is the most effective organisation method for combatting international cannibalisation.

4) Semantic flux - family network cannibalisation

This is the version of conflict that impacts SEO strategy most. Here we see interrelated (family) sites offering similarly themed content.

This is more difficult to remedy and will impact entire online strategies.
We have seen this issue across RBS and Natwest, Yorkshire Bank and Clydesdale, as well as Gap and Old Navy.

 

Ultimately, to avoid semantic flux you must create clearly defined, unique content. However, in some rare cases this hasn’t guaranteed fixed positions and SERP visibility. Hosts, servers and CMS’s may need to be reviewed if such issues persist.

How do you combat internal keyword cannibalisation?

For the example above, a quick and simple way to deal with this cannibalisation (though definitely not full-proof) is to introduce a landing page, a canonical linking structure, and uniquely themed product pages.

Why is keyword cannibalisation more endemic now?

Keyword Cannibalisation has almost always occurred. However, it has come to the fore recently due to better SEO knowledge and SERP changes.

Far fewer pages are now returned from a single domain in the SERPs. Previously Google would offer multiple results for a search term. Now you’re most likely to see one result per domain.

How do you identify and troubleshoot cannibalisation?

Daily Tracking

Without this it's pretty hard to see weekly cannibalisation. Imagine if every 7 days the same page was returning, but in between all sorts of conflict was going on?

Unlimited URL tracking

You simply can't see cannibalisation if you have domain only tracking.

Top 100 tracking

So much is going on in the lower pages of Google. Of course, users don't go this far down, but that's not the point. There is a reason why you are down there in the basement of search, and that's probably because there is something wrong - you need to be able to identify the issue.

Unlimited competitor tracking

You may not know which (internal and external) domains are affecting your site. This is why it is important to be able to see anyone that comes into the top 100 on any given day.

Access to historical data

Again, without this you won't be able to go back and analyse previous impact or conflict.
Cannibalisation, in one form or another, is happening to every site. Using the right tracking tools to analyse and remedy it will, in the long run, make the site far better optimised for both the user and the search engine.

 

By Sam Silverwood-Cope, CMO of Pi Datametrics. 

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