Internal, International, and Subdomain Cannibalization — Whiteboard Friday

So, let’s imagine you wake up one day and are on page 1 for “men’s blazers.” We all want to be on page 1 if we’re selling men’s blazers. Then suddenly, you notice your content drops. When you take a closer look, you might discover that multiple URLs are returning over a period of time for the same keyword. A point to note about cannibalization is that it happens at the keyword level.

It’s not content level. It’s all about the keyword. So one piece of content may not be in conflict for another term, for a derivative term, for example “men’s jackets” or “men’s summer jackets,” and that page may exist beautifully on page one. But let’s imagine that you have one, two, three, four pages.

These could be men’s summer blazers, men’s winter blazers, men’s 2023 blazers, for example. The chances are if these pages are similar and if they contain the keyword that you’re trying to position for, i.e., “men’s blazers,” in the title, chances are you’re going to get conflict because we know that the HTML title is one of the strongest indicators to Google from a theming perspective.

URL, title, Header 1, meta description, content, all of that counts. But you’ll find when you make changes to the title, that can have a pretty instantaneous impact on visibility in less than 24 hours. So back to our situation of cannibalization. For URLs, what do we want to do? Well, we’ve got to make a decision.

Which one do we want to be the doorway into our ecosystem? If we don’t decide, Google will make that decision for us, and we’ll end up in a situation of cannibalization. Cannibalization could be in line. It could all be happening at the bottom of page 1. Sometimes, people say, “Well, I’m on page 1, but I don’t really care.”

But you should care, because imagine your audience are searching for the men’s blazer and they find your piece of content and they love it, and they come back the next day and they Google it again, and they find it again, “Oh, it’s a different page.” They go into the site in a different area. Suddenly, I’m confused because we’ve got incoherent, uncoordinated, and haphazard doorways into our world.

So we need to make the decision and not leave that to the search engines. There are a number of things that we can do to actually fix this. But the first thing we need to do is check the position of the URLs for other terms, for derivative terms. Do these pieces of content position in their own right?

Before we start tampering, before we start playing with titles, before we start redirecting, before we do anything, do they position themselves in their own right? Then we have choices to make. One possible choice, and I’ve seen a lot of clients do this, is to merge one of the older bits of content with the new content, and that works wonderfully because we’re not losing anything.

So we merge that, and then, of course, we 301 the original article. So we immediately get that injection of authority. Okay, downgrade the theme. How do you downgrade the theme? Remember the title, the strongest element on the page? We can actually change the title so it’s not about men’s blazers. We can say “men’s outfits for the summer,” if that’s appropriate.

Again, let’s not do that if that page positions in its own right because we don’t want to lose that traffic. We can also check the traffic to the page as well. Internally link. If we decide, for example, that A is the page that we want to be our doorway, let’s give it the authority that it needs to position.

Let’s link internally from B, C, and D to A using the anchor text “men’s blazers.” What are we doing? Well, we’re saying to Google this page over here is all about men’s blazers, and the anchor text and those links are going to give that page the authority that it needs.

So we do that in conjunction with some of these other options. We can also No Index if appropriate. So we have a number of tools in our arsenal. But just imagine that we love all of these pages and we don’t want to lose those because that’s summer blazers, winter blazers, linen blazers, and other blazers.

Another thing that you can do, if your CMS allows, is to actually build a hub page. Let’s call that hub page Men’s Blazers, and let’s link down from the new page, call that Page X, Men’s Blazers, to this one using the anchor text “summer blazers,” to this one, Winter, Linen, etc. Then crucially, we take the internal linking here and we link back from all of these to the hub page.

What have we created there? This wonderful hub-and-spoke structure within our site that your audience will make sense of, and Google will make sense of as well. So, really, it’s about sending signals to Google so that Google doesn’t get confused.

So this is down to us because the search engine is incredibly sensitive. So that’s how you can fix it, and you’ve got a number of choices.