Cannibalization – Moz

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom Capper walks you through a problem many SEOs have faced: cannibalization. What is it, how do you recognize it, and how to fix it? Watch to find out!

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Video transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today we’re going to be talking about cannibalization, which we write like this here in the UK: cannibalization. What do we mean by cannibalization?

What is cannibalization?

So this is basically where a site has two competing URLs and therefore, we suspect, does less well. So maybe we think the site is splitting its stake across its two different urls, or Google may not be sure which url to display. Or maybe Google thinks it is a duplicate content problem or something. One way or another, the site does less well because it has two URLs.

As an example I have this imaginary SERP. So imagine Moz trying to rank for the keyword “burger”. Imagine, Moz has decided to take a wild tangent into his business model and we will now try to rank for “burgers”.

So in first place we have underdog Bergz and we would hope to really beat those people, but for some reason we don’t. Then at position two we have Moz’s “Buy Burgers” page in the moz.com/shop subdirectory, which obviously does not exist, but this is a hypothesis. This is a commercial landing page where you can buy a burger.

Then in third place we have this page with the best burgers on the Moz blog. It’s more informative. It tells you what the attributes of a good burger are, how to spot a good burger, where to buy a good burger, all this neutral editorial information.

So in this situation we hypothesize that if only one page was used for that keyword, Moz could potentially overtake the top spot. If we think that is the case, we would probably call it cannibalization.

The alternative hypothesis, however, is, well, in fact there could be two intentions here. It may be that Google wants to display a commercial page and an information page on this SERP, and it happens that the second best commercial page is that of Moz and the best information page is also that of Moz. We have heard Google in the past few years or representatives of Google in the past few years talking about positions in search results that are reserved for certain types of results that might be reserved for an information result or the like. So that doesn’t necessarily mean there is cannibalization. So we’ll talk a little later about how we can somehow make a situation like this unambiguous.

Classic cannibalization

However, let’s talk about the classic case first. So the classic, really clear, really obvious case of cannibalization is a graph like this.

So this is the kind of graph you would see in a lot of ranking software. You can see the time and days of the week along the bottom axis. Then we have the rank and of course we want to be as high as possible and close to position one.

Then we see the two URLs that are color-coded and here are green and red. If one of them is ranked, the other is forgotten, is not even in the top 100. There is always only one who appears at a time, and they displace themselves in the SERP. When we see this type of behavior we can be pretty sure that what we are seeing is some kind of cannibalization.

Less obvious cases

However, sometimes it is less obvious. So a good example I found recently is if, or at least in my case, when I search Naples on Google, as in the place name, I see Wikipedia first and second. The Wikipedia page ranking first related to Naples, Italy, and the Wikipedia page in second place related to Naples, Florida.

I don’t think Wikipedia is cannibalizing itself in this situation. I think it happened by chance … Google had decided that this SERP is ambiguous and that this keyword “Naples” requires multiple intents, and Wikipedia happens to be the best site for two of those intents.

So I wouldn’t go to Wikipedia and say, “Oh, you need to combine these two pages into one page in Naples, Florida, and Italy” or something like that. That is clearly not necessary.

Questions to ask

So, in this ambiguous case, if you want to find out if cannibalization is ongoing, then there are a few questions we could ask ourselves.

1. Do we think we are below average?

So one of the best questions we could ask, which is a tough one in SEO, is: do we think we are underperforming? So I know that every SEO in the world thinks that their website deserves a higher ranking, well, maybe the most. But do we have other examples of very similar keywords where we only have one page where we do significantly better? Or did we suddenly collapse when we introduced the second page? Because when we see such behavior, you know, it may not be straightforward, but it could arouse suspicion.

2. Do both competing sides appear?

If we look at similar examples of similar keywords that are less ambiguous in intent, perhaps in the case of burgers, where the SERP for “best burger” and the SERP for “buy burger” in general gave completely different results, then we think maybe, oh, okay, we should have two separate sides here, and we just have to make sure that they are clearly distinguished.

But if in fact the same pages appear for all of these keywords, we should also consider a page, as Google seems to prefer that. It doesn’t really separate those intentions. That is the kind of thing we can look for, as I said, is not straightforward, but rather a small clue.

3. Consolidate or differentiate?

As soon as we have found out whether we want two sides or one, or whether in this case we can find the best solution in two sides or one, we will either consolidate or differentiate.

So if we think there should only be one page, we might want to take our two pages, combine the best content, choose the strongest URL in terms of backlinks and history, etc. and redirect the other URL to that combined page that has the best content that serves to vary slightly from what we now know is an intention, and so on and so on.

Of course, if we want two sides, we don’t want them to cannibalize. So we have to make sure that they are clearly distinguished. What happens often here is a commercial page like this one about buying burgers, ironically for SEO reasons, it could be a block of text below with a bunch of editorial or SEO text about burgers and that can make it pretty confusing, what purpose this site serves.

Similarly, we may have decided at some point on this page that we would like to introduce some products or something similar there. It might have started looking pretty commercial. So when we have both, we need to make sure that they address very clearly different intentions and that they do not contain mostly the same information and keywords and the like.

Quick tip

After all, it would be better if we didn’t get into the situation in the first place. A quick tip that I would recommend as a last souvenir is before producing any content, for example before I produced this whiteboard on Friday, I cannibalized site: moz.com so I can see what content existed previously on Moz.com, which was about cannibalization.

I can see oh this article is very old so we could – it’s a very old whiteboard Friday so we might consider redirecting it. This piece mentions cannibalization, so it’s not really about that. Maybe it’s about something else. As long as it doesn’t target that keyword, we should be fine, and so on and so on. Just think about what other parts there are because if there is something that is essentially targeting the same keyword then you should obviously consider consolidating or redirecting or just updating the old part.

That’s all for today. Thanks very much.

Video transcription from Speechpad.com.