Content creation takes time and effort. In order to write a blog post that outranks the search results, it needs hours of research and finds audience intent. But what if you can’t get any benefit out of the content?  

Gone are the days when Google used to rank websites with specific keywords hundreds of times (if not thousands) on the content. However, Google has become way smarter today. If you want to rank higher on search results with keyword stuffing, you’re wrong. 

And, in most cases, the tendency of keyword stuffing rewards you with a Google penalty. I know this is, unfortunately. 

In addition, if you have multiple web pages that target relatively the same keywords, Google becomes confused regarding what web page to rank. Now, I know what you are wondering. 

You most possibly wonder, “ Is there anything wrong if google ranks multiple websites?”. I do agree with you. But, in some cases, you may not want Google to rank a specific web page for targeted keywords you use in multiple contents. 

Let’s say you sell dog food online. And you optimized content using the keywords like best dog food, healthy dog food, etc., two years back. Now, you create other content using the same keywords, which is pretty latest. 

So here, you badly want Google to rank the latest content with updated information, not the first one. In most cases, optimizing content using similar keywords badly impacts your search result performance, let alone ensure more traffic. 

So, here’s why the concept of keyword cannibalization comes into play. 

What Is Keyword Cannibalization? 

Keyword cannibalization targets a group of keywords for multiple website content. More often, keyword cannibalization is not a good practice. Instead, it can negatively impact the traffic you expect for a keyword. 

More precisely, if you have multiple articles or blog posts on your website and they rank based on similar keywords. It is called keyword cannibalization.

Due to this, you can hardly determine exactly what content ranks higher on the search engine result pages. But don’t worry. There Are ways you can get rid of the issue of keyword cannibalization. Here’s how. 

Audit Your Website Content and Delete Content

The very first thing you should try to do is to audit your website. Moreover, if your website is not so big and the number of content is not more in number, auditing website website content will be effective for you.

Here, you need to manually delete the post that you don’t want to keep in your website in order to avoid keyword cannibalization. Make sure you delete the content that is not relevant now and you have a new content instead of it. 

However, if you have a comparatively bigger website, then manually finding the multiple content with the same keywords may take some time. Here, you need to use tools.

Remove the Keywords

Instead of removing content, you can remove some of the keywords as well if you don’t want to lose traffic. Here, you need to manually remove some of the keywords that you don’t find helpful or relevant. 

Use 301 Redirects

This is another most efficient way you can deal with the cannibalization keywords. You need to set up 301 redirects on the web pages that is not relevant now. With 301 redirects enable, visitor will come to the more latest content than the irrelevant one.