To reach the top, you need to know very well the nature of the path you are taking to reach, this applies to the path that SEO Agencies take to improve SEO, and one of the main elements in this path is Targeting keywords.

One of the common mistakes that some SEO workers make is Keyword Cannibalization, which is then proven to hurt your website’s appearance on search engines and is often misunderstood.

 What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?

Some SEO specialists rely on the idea of frequently duplicating keywords within the content to obtain better results in appearing in search engines, but this has proven to be the main reason for the PageRank delay.

Keyword Cannibalization is one of the steps that eat up the opportunity to appear and lead to search engine results on Google, especially when your website begins to spread and grow, and with experience, it has been proven that deconstructing keywords hinders your ranking on Google.

SEO experts have confirmed that Keyword Cannibalization is very harmful to the SEO process because doing so may put your site’s content in competition with itself, and we conclude from this that this may be the main problem facing your site in reaching its position in search engines.

Know the negative effects of Keyword Cannibalization on SEO

Keyword Cannibalization can pose problems with your SEO, and the downsides of deconstructed keywords include:

• Reduce the authority of your site

Your page is gaining unreliability because clicks that can appear on one page appear on multiple related pages, you have turned your pages into competitors and now you are fighting for page views and SERP rankings.

• Distribute links on multiple pages

Keyword cannibalizing causes backlinks to split and not go to a single source, which leads visitors to more pages instead of one reliable page.

• Google reduces the value of your most relevant page

Keywords are one of the main ways in which we help Google understand what our pages are about, so if they are all the same then that is a mistake.

• Losing your share of your creep

Google is known to crawl content before it gives it confidence, and keyword Cannibalization makes you lose this feature.

• Sign of poor quality provided

If you use one keyword on more than one page, this indicates that the content you provide is weak or inconsistent with your keywords on every page.

• Losing customers by referring them to less reliable pages

Instead of directing new visitors to that page, and making it the most reliable page possible, you are losing out on potential customers when they land on less relevant pages.

How to Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

You must start immediately to fix the content that you disassemble, and this will lead to positive results on the ranking of your site in the search engines, and you must also be prepared to change the ranking randomly to prove the results that will be great within a few months.

But there are some steps to take to avoid Cannibalization of SEO:

• On-page SEO

Often this is done by optimizing: Meta tag for both title and description, removing keywords, changing search intent.

These steps give Google a message about your target keywords, and you should start using some on-page SEO tools like SEMRush or similar tools to optimize your pages based on real-world SEO data.

• Update internal links

Keyword decoding causes poor internal link structure; So you have to browse all the internal links for two disjointed pages and fix the internal linking texts, and this helps in the quick update of the link text or link processing. Either way, the WP Link Status Pro extension will be really helpful in finding and fixing link text issues.

• Remove content

The fastest way to fix the problem of disjointed content, by deleting the page that does not serve the purpose, and this is done with one of two options, namely: set code 404 or 410 for the page that was deleted and use Google’s URL removal tool to remove the page from the web index, or redirect the deleted content Through Code 301 to the winning page.

• Redirecting to the standard link

One smart way to fix keyword overstatement is useful when breaking up two or more pages that you don’t want to delete or merge. In this case, you can choose one page that you want to arrange, and from the other pages, set the (Canonical) link tag on the target page.