Introduction
Let’s face it: content cannibalization is a scary topic. Content cannibalization is one of the signal that your content are being stretched too thin. We all know that when one page has too many duplicates, search engines get confused and end up thinking that your site has been hacked. To prevent content cannibalization you need to be careful in many ways like duplicate content, creafting unique content and be careful about repeating title and headlines.
But there are ways to avoid content cannibalization, even if you have lots of pages on your site.
Make sure the new page’s content is significantly different from the existing content.
The biggest mistake people make when launching new pages is that they just change the text. This can be a problem because it’s easy to confuse readers and make them think the content has changed when in fact nothing has changed at all.
Instead, you should try to change the content on your existing pages as well by making sure that it is significantly different from what’s already there. For example:
- Don’t just change the title of an article, but also make sure that it contains different keywords than any other article on your site.
- Don’t add a new page with a bunch of random junk articles in their place; instead, create an entirely new section with relevant topics.
Change the focus of your new content to target a different audience or keywords.
If the new piece of content is targeting a different audience or has a different focus, change the keywords and language used in the piece.
For example, if you’re creating an article about how to use Instagram Stories for business marketing, but it was published on your personal blog instead of being republished as part of your company’s social media marketing guide.
You could potentially use different images and language than what was used previously in order to attract a new audience.
Link your older content to new similar piece of content.
Internal linking from an older, high-value piece of content to your new, similar piece of content is crucial.
If you have a well-performing page on your site that receives lots of links and traffic. One way to use this existing content to boost the new page is by linking back through internal links or social media profiles.
You can also use the link juice from a high-value page like this one by boosting its relevance in search results by including more information about similar topics within those same searches.
Use canonical tags to identify your preferred version of a page.
A canonical tag is a special HTML element that you can use on any page to point it to its preferred version. The element identifies the location where content should be displayed, while the element provides human-readable information about what content is being linked from another page or blog.
This information helps users understand how they should access different versions of your site’s content, such as when you’ve created separate versions for mobile devices vs desktop computers.
Create custom URLs for your pages.
Use a URL shortener to create custom URLs for each page on your site. This will help you avoid duplicate content issues and also keep track of which pages are most popular among your audience.
You may be tempted to make all of your pages redirect from the root domain to the shortened version, but this is not ideal. Because it makes it difficult for users who have bookmarked a link in their browser history or saved it as a bookmarklet.
Instead, use 301 redirects so that when someone clicks on one of these links, they’ll be taken directly back to where they came from instead of being presented with some other version entirely!
Don’t create pages with similar titles and headings.
You should do this by using different titles and headings to indicate that the new content is different from the original one. For example, if you have an article called “How To Make Money as a Freelancer,”.Then don’t use that title on another page called “How To Make Money as a Freelancer 2.”
The same goes for your keywords: don’t use them in the same way on both pages. Instead, choose keywords that are unique to each page—and make sure you include them in both places!
Use a 301 redirect on one page so that it redirects to another page.
The best way to prevent content cannibalization is by using a 301 redirect on one page so that it redirects to another page rather than returning a 404 (page not found) error.
301 redirects are best for SEO purposes because they help Google understand that the content has moved and thus improves ranking in search results. You can also use them for consolidating multiple pages into one or changing the focus of a page.
Add more text to your new page so that google identify it as original content instead of duplicate content.
- Make sure the text is original. Don’t just copy the same content from another website and paste it into your new post. Google’s algorithm works by looking at the words used. So if you’re using keywords (e.g., “Digital Marketing“) everywhere on your page, then you’re probably not going to get any extra juice out of them. Unless, they have some value beyond just being search terms that people type into Google when they’re looking for information about digital marketing!
- Use a plagiarism checker before publishing anything new or significant to make sure no one else has copied your work without permission. This can be especially helpful if someone else publishes something similar within 24 hours of yours because it’ll show up as duplicate content under both sites’ rankings and therefore reduce traffic.
Consolidate short, low-quality pages into larger pieces of content.
If you have a lot of short, low-quality pages on your site, it makes sense to consolidate them into larger pieces of content(Writing Pillar Post) that provide better value to users and search engines.
You certainly don’t want search engines thinking you have duplicate pages on your site!
- You certainly don’t want search engines thinking you have duplicate pages on your site!
- Search engines are going to penalize you for duplicate content.
- Google will think you’re trying to manipulate search results and rankings by having multiple pages about the same topic, or even the same person.
Conclusion
Content cannibalization is a problem that every website owner faces at some point. It can be difficult to know when and what to do about it, but we hope this post has given you some ideas for how to prevent it from occurring on your site!
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