When a company operates a website for the purpose of sales or prospect generation over the Internet, SEO measures, which optimize the company’s website so that it appears at the top of search engines, are the most important issue.
One of the factors that prevents your website from ranking high on search engines is cannibalization.
This time, I will explain the problems with cannibalization and how to solve them.
What is cannibalization that you should be careful about when taking SEO measures?
If there are multiple similar pages in articles created on a company’s website, search engines will judge them as duplicates of the same page, leading to confusion over which page to display as a legitimate search page. will appear.
This condition is called cannibalization.
Cannibalization is called cannibalization because when it occurs, it can have a negative impact on multiple targeted pages.
Cannibalization is not a Google penalty, but it has a similar impact on corporate sites.
Google displays pages with legitimate reviews at the top.
Multiple pages that have been cannibalized, causing confusion in ratings, will no longer be displayed at the top.
When cannibalization occurs, there are cases where multiple similar pages are displayed in search engine results, and the displayed rankings change rapidly.
If the cannibalization phenomenon that appears in search engines continues for several months, it will slowly move to the bottom of the search rankings.
In particular, corporate websites should consider measures against cannibalization.
Corporate websites often operate online shops that sell tens of millions of items, or information sites or blog sites that are frequently updated for the purpose of prospecting, so the keywords and content are likely to be similar. .
Therefore, it is necessary to assume that cannibalization will occur and consider countermeasures.
Problems that cannibalization can cause
When cannibalization occurs, there are two negative effects.
-Decrease in search rankings
When cannibalization occurs, search engines may display multiple pages as having the same importance, wondering which pages to rank higher in search results.
When displaying multiple pages, the evaluations of the pages will be different, resulting in lower evaluations, lower search rankings, and lower rankings.
・The page you want to display is not displayed.
If there are multiple similar pages, search engines will display one of them as the legitimate page and treat the other pages as duplicates.
Pages that are not determined to be legitimate will be scrolled significantly less frequently.
If a page that a company wants to display in a search is not determined by the search engine to be a legitimate page, it may not be displayed.
Solutions for dealing with cannibalization
Google, the most important search engine for SEO measures, introduces several methods to prevent cannibalization by specifying legitimate pages when similar pages exist. .
・Insert a <link> tag that indicates a link to the regular page in the code of the duplicate page
This is a method of linking similar pages to a regular page by putting a <link> tag in the header of a page other than the regular page.
By including <link> tags on similar pages, Google will be more accurate in determining which pages are legitimate.
In large-scale sites, there are cases where it is difficult to manage the method of inserting <link> tags.
・Specify the official page in the site map
If the site operated by your company is large, specifying the URL of the official page in the sitemap will help prevent cannibalization.
Sitemaps are easy to work with even on large sites.
On the other hand, the certainty that the URL specified in the sitemap will be determined as a legitimate page is lower than the method of inserting <link> tags on similar pages.
・Use 301 redirects
Use a 301 redirect if the information is outdated or if you want to create a new page and retire it.
This tells Googlebot that a similar page is being deprecated and that there is a new legitimate page.
Using 301 redirects will ensure that redirects from pages scheduled for deletion are redirected to legitimate pages.
This allows you to smoothly transfer users and search engines who visited similar pages you want to abolish to the new regular page.
summary
◆The first way to prevent cannibalization is to avoid creating articles with the same keywords on the same site.
◆Cannibalization may occur without you even realizing it.
◆When creating a new page, you will need to check the keywords in the site search to make sure there are no identical keywords.
◆You can also search for “site:URL + keyword” on Google to see if there are any articles using the keyword on your site.
◆To prevent cannibalization, regularly check using Google Search Console.