What Is Page Cannibalization? How It Affects Your SEO

Cannibalization can occur when you publish new or duplicate content on your website. Duplicate content is a dangerous thing, because search engines may perceive it as spammy and can penalize you for it. SEO consultant Northern Beaches discourage to use difficult content in your website or blog.

Treat each piece of unique content as a separate entity. If you have a blog post that does well, consider turning it into an infographic, repackaging it into an ebook for lead generation purposes, or even turning it into a video tutorial to increase its reach. Search engines are now indexing more multimedia objects than ever before. Video and infographics have become extremely popular ways to convey information in a clear and concise manner.

Search engines are well aware of this trend and will likely continue to favor multimedia content over webpages that only consist of written text. If you start publishing more multimedia content on your website, you’ll find that you’re able to get more traffic from the search engines.

Cannibalization is one of the most challenging problems that enterprise companies face when developing their website content. It can be really frustrating to try and develop great content for your company, only to see your search rankings dwindle as a result of creating too much content.

Trying to keep your users engaged with your website while also maintaining good SEO and keeping Google from penalizing you for so-called “over optimization” can seem like an insurmountable task.

It’s a term you’ve probably heard tossed about during discussions about search engine optimization for ecommerce sites. The concept is simple: it’s the idea that your ecommerce site might rank better in search results if you duplicate your pages. You might think this sounds crazy — but cannibalization, while not desirable, can actually be a good thing.

Page cannibalization happens when a website has duplicative content. Duplicate content is a problem because search engine optimization (SEO) uses the keywords in your copy to determine how relevant your page is to the user’s search query. The more relevant your page is, the higher it will rank on search engine results pages.

Trouble occurs when a page contains content that is duplicated on another page of the same website. Search engines will often punish sites for this practice because they can interpret it as an attempt to manipulate rankings by stuffing keywords on one page and then linking to that page from multiple locations. The result, if you do not avoid link-based manipulation, is that all of your pages suffer in the rankings because they are seen as having too much keyword stuffing, even if the individual pages themselves are relevant and high quality.

As many of us know, there is a constant battle between the two sides of SEO. On one side we have users and on the other side we have search engines. And you can guess which side wins. Every day, people want to search for something and get a relevant and satisfying result that does not provide links to irrelevant pages.

The same goes for Google which is constantly updating algorithms to provide better and more relevant results to its users. Sometimes this can lead to certain penalties – also known as “cannibalization” – and can have a destructive effect on your SEO campaign.