Keyword cannibalization occurs when pages on your website compete against each other for certain keywords. Your pages are “cannibalizing” (eating) popularity from other pages to gain search engine ranking.

Webmasters are sometimes unaware of keyword cannibalization, or just automatically optimize the same keyword on all pages thinking it strengthens their SEO. Actually, the OPPOSITE happens and it hurts your SEO.

Keyword cannibalization is detrimental to your site and can affect pages in the following ways:

•    Causes bad indexing – Google crawls your pages and is forced to choose one of many page versions based on its “best” query (and may not even pick a relevant page).

•    Website pages compete against each other for a position in search engines

•    Reduces SEO effectiveness – Anchor text, keyword targeting and link power are spread across many pages

•    Quality of your content suffers – When you write about the same topic on every page, your content sounds replicated and dull (which makes your site less attractive to links)

•    Limits search engine traffic – Don’t put your keywords in one cyber basket. There are thousands of variations that would work just as well (if not better) in the rankings compared to that one phrase/keyword that’s repeated on every page.

How to Avoid Keyword Cannibalization Issues
The biggest problem with keyword cannibalization is duplicate content, especially when pages have identical titles and meta descriptions.  Think carefully about your website structure including anchor text and keyword placement/prominence throughout pages.

In order to clean up your pages and make them SEO-friendly, the following tips will help you solve keyboard cannibalization problems.

•    Create unique meta tag titles and descriptions for your home page and sub pages. Use words that specifically describe that page.

•    For blogs, create unique headlines appropriate to the blog. Variations of keywords are acceptable as long as you don’t go overboard with them. If your blog is about California wine trips you could use “California wine vacations” or “California wine destinations.”

•    Organize keyword lists. Use broader, competitive keyword phrases/terms on top level/shallow pages. Your home page and top level pages will have more potential for ranking when you use those broader terms.  Add those specific “long tail” keywords when you create blog posts or write articles – these are known as your deep pages.
If you are a novice when it comes to SEO and can’t figure out which keywords to on your pages, don’t worry – there are great keyword search tools available!  Begin your search with a broad term and use those results to find the most popular and relevant keywords to add to your pages.
You may be surprised to learn that the keyword you originally wanted to use didn’t get as many searches. For example, you wanted to use “California red wine” but it only has 6,000 searches. However, you changed the phrase to “California wine” and it generated over 200,000 searches. “California wine” would be a better keyword phrase to use.
The following keyword search tools will assist you with finding appropriate keywords for your content.

• Google’s AdWords
• Wordtracker
• Nichebot
• KeywordDiscovery

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Duplicate content has become a hot issue in the SEO world and it can cause big problems for sites. Don’t be a duplicate content offender - use these best SEO practices to avoid duplication issues.

It’s very likely that another website could be passing off your content as their own, and you may not even know it!  As a result, your site could be penalized as the violator for duplicated content and not picked up as the “original” expert source.

The worst thing that can happen is that your site is dropped from high-ranking search engines such as Google. Other issues: traffic dramatically decreases, ranks wrong page versions (page 2 instead of page 1), and low ranking for newly-launched sites.

Duplicate content is broken down into two categories: external and internal.

External

• Tricky “scrapper” sites troll the Internet searching sites for fresh content. They swipe YOUR content and pass it off as their original content. Your site gets banned because your site is recognized in search engines as duplicated content.
• If you find out that your content is used without permission, contact the webmaster and ask them to remove your content immediately.
• If you run into a webmaster that doesn’t budge, contact the search engine directly to report the duplicated content.

Internal

• Sites that sell products sometimes run into duplicated content issues, especially if they include multiple product descriptions on their web pages.
• Blogs are often notorious for duplicate content – this happens when identical content shows up on both the direct post URL and home page.

How Can You Check For Duplicate Content?

These free SEO tools can easily check sites for duplication issues.

• Copyscape – Searches for duplicated/plagiarized content
• Xenu – Scans site links and searches for identical URL titles
• Google Webmaster tools – Reports duplicate meta descriptions and titles

These tools check the following areas:

• Google cache
• 404 header response
• PR (PageRank) dispersion
• Default pages and similarity
• WWW and Non-WWW Headers

Take proactive steps to ensure your content isn’t duplicated

• Avoid empty web pages (placeholders) whenever possible
• Minimize similar content – merge similar pages or create unique content for each page
• Keep internal linking consistent
• Use only top-notch domains that are country-specific
• Carefully review webmaster guidelines (under Google Webmaster Tools)
• Understand how content is displayed (especially sites that show the same content on different pages such as forums and blogs)

How To Handle Illegal Copyright Issues
If webmasters or search engines don’t remove your plagiarized content from other sites, contact the web hosting company or domain registration company. If they host illegal copyrighted material, they violate their Terms of Service and DMCA regulations and could get into trouble.

These companies can’t take that risk, so they will usually pull off the plagiarized content immediately. In severe abuse cases with content violations, the owner of the copyrighted material/website can take action with the hosting or domain registration company to shut down the site permanently. You can’t afford to have your website shut down so don’t be a duplicate content offender!