My Site is Suffering from Keyword Cannibalization

[Encrypted]

Hey guys ,

I have a serious issue with one of my sites and i'ld love your input on this.

I've just discovered that my site is suffering from "Keyword Cannibalization" in the sense that google is ranking the wrong pages for the right keywords.

To those who don't may not understand keyword cannibalism , it occurs when multiple pages on the same website are targeting the same keyword phrase or group , thereby making it difficult for google to decide which page to rank.

But my case is extreme.

Normally , keyword cannibalization occurs when several pages have the focus keyword in their title / meta description , however , mine is quite different because google searches DEEP into my website to look for pages with mentions of my keywords. They go as far as checking the user comments on those pages.

For instance , if my keyword is latest samsung phones , google searches my site for pages that have "latest" "samsung" and "phones" in them. They even check user comments for those phrases.

The annoying this is that those phrases don't appear in the title / meta description but if they appear as separate phrases in the article / comments , google puts everything together and tries to rank the page for that keyword.

So i end up with many pages trying to rank for a keyword despite the fact that the keyword is not in the title/ meta description of those pages and i already have an article written specifically for that keyword.

Please i need your opinion on this as i am very confused on what to do. This issue has badly affected my overall site and i'm losing rankings left right center. I've lost almost 50% of my traffic from July 31st - Now.

Cc : @Ryuzaki & others

 

[Ryuzaki]

A properly optimized page with the title tag, header tags, alt tags, and all of that isn't going to be outranked by a page that happened to have the words used in a comment but is otherwise unoptimized.

If we assume you don't have page-based penalties due to anchor text ratios or over-optimization, then the way to fix it is to purposefully de-optimize the other pages for your main term, while sending more relevancy signals for that term to the pages you do want to rank.

So you may go to the pages you don't want ranking and take out instances of those phrases, especially in the 'on-page' spots. And then you can go around your site and interlink to the pages you do want to rank from relevant pages with relevant and exact match anchor text.

Another issue with phrases like "Latest Samsung Phones" is that they are time-sensitive. They are QDF's, meaning Queries that Deserve Freshness. Old pages are going to lose ranking power and newer pages are going to get bursts of it then lose it too. It'd be like preparing a page a decade in advance on the death of some celebrity in order to get an age-boost over everyone else. It doesn't work like that on these searches.

If your terms aren't QDF terms and that was a more random example, I'd take a look and see if you aren't over-optimizing your target pages.

It could also be the case that you're sending the wrong kind of intent-signals in your content. You could be sending commercial signals for an informational query, casual signals for a research based query with an expectation of a higher grade-level reading complexity score, etc. This is easy to spot based on what's currently ranking in the top 10 and if your style is matching it.

 

[Encrypted]

If we assume you don't have page-based penalties due to anchor text ratios or over-optimization, then the way to fix it is to purposefully de-optimize the other pages for your main term, while sending more relevancy signals for that term to the pages you do want to rank.

So you may go to the pages you don't want ranking and take out instances of those phrases, especially in the 'on-page' spots. And then you can go around your site and interlink to the pages you do want to rank from relevant pages with relevant and exact match anchor text.

Hi , Thanks for your input. I've just done exactly as you said above and i'm hoping for positive results

I have a few more questions

1) Is there a chance this issue would automatically fix itself?

Because i noticed this all started when i changed theme In June.

I changed my theme from one that automatically shows latest posts on homepage to one that requires a widget to build homepage (create a page , set it as homepage , use widgets to build homepage).

My thinking is that this happened because of a change in site structure and its going to take a while before google properly understands my new structure.

2) Concerning internal links , is there a point where it becomes too much? For instance one post gets >10 links from other posts on the same site. Any negative effect? And when adding internal links , is it okay to use exact match text?

Interlinking is something i've been cautious of because my thinking is that too much internal links can actually have a negative effect and cause a page to lose rank.

Any thoughts?

 

[Ryuzaki]

1) Is there a chance this issue would automatically fix itself?

Yeah, I've seen it fix itself but we're talking on the order of 6 months. Sometimes that's how I choose to deal with it once I've confirmed that it's not an 'issue' but a mistake on my end. I mentioned how we can write the wrong type of content for a query that's classified as "information" or "commercial." Even beyond that, you may get everything right and a post that you wrote that is less optimized for the term might rank simply due to the links it's been receiving. So there's not necessarily an issue there so much as an imbalance of link power. Often that'll shake itself out over time. In some cases it doesn't matter which page ranks as long as you're ranking, especially when it's not a commercial post.

Concerning internal links , is there a point where it becomes too much? For instance one post gets >10 links from other posts on the same site. Any negative effect? And when adding internal links , is it okay to use exact match text?

This was a problem some sites saw when it came to Panda. eCommerce sites had the worst time of it, and the reason is that when you have 500,000 pages all with the same sidebar navigations and breadcrumbs using product tittles or page titles, it's easy to end up with over-optimization in internal anchor text. For a normal blog, no, you're not going to run into this unless you only ever use the exact match anchor. Even then it's going to be hard to screw yourself over. Just switch it up and add modifier terms and use other phrases here and there and you'll have zero concern. You can go well over 10. I have posts on my main project that get internal links site wide even, and they still rank. But in those cases I prefer image anchors to avoid any issue with actual text. I give them extra internal links using text links too. You can go pretty hard internally. It's not something you should fear, but use.

 

[turbin3]

What volume of pages are we talking about on this domain? A few hundred or very few thousand? Tens or hundreds of thousands? 1M+? The possible issues could be very different depending on the volume and nature of the site.

With the theme change, are you absolutely sure significant duplicate content was not created due to some technical issues (pagination of comments, stuff no longer no-indexed that was before, etc.)?

Also, are you aware of what their current crawl behavior/focus is on your site? Do you know what they're crawling frequently, and if they're crawling anything they shouldn't be? For some keywords, crawl frequency can be a ranking factor, though I'm guessing this probably isn't the issue based on what you've said so far.

One other annoying thing to be aware of is the randomized ranking transitions (random declines, improvements, spikes, etc. leading to the final adjusted rank) Google often implements, to help obfuscate attribution. According to the technology patent, they show the period taking as much as 90 days, though it could potentially be more or less time than that. You mention the theme update in June. As of now, that's probably just beyond 90 days, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that you've been in that transition period. Can you describe the nature/trend of the ranking decline? Any spikes, or just a slow, consistent decline?

Also, look at your sitewide links, navs, etc. before vs. after. Did anything change?

With the new homepage design (and any other similar "widget"-built pages), is the content static in those widgets, or updating? If it's static, are those pages being crawled/trafficked more frequently, and has traffic declined to other posts that previously would have received that traffic (aka lower engagement)?

One test you might consider on the homepage, especially if there's static lists/widgets of content, is taking one of your money posts that's declined, and put it back on the homepage. Give it some time and see what happens. Don't look at the short term change, but at least 30-90 days. Get that going so you can let it stew while you're trying to make other improvements. If that had a positive effect, that might point towards CTR/traffic, link value passing to posts from the homepage, or some other internal linking factors.

Those are not necessarily the first things I'd look at, depending on the type of site and size. Just thought I'd throw some technical recc's in though, considering the theme update and potential technical issues that often stem from updates. Ryuzaki already covered a lot of the good stuff that's probably going to apply more often.

 

[chanilla]

The annoying this is that those phrases don't appear in the title / meta description but if they appear as separate phrases in the article / comments , google puts everything together and tries to rank the page for that keyword.

This sounds fishy. If you analyze quite a bit of broad spectrum competitive research data, it's very rare for a page to outrank an optimized/targeted page just based on paragraph chars, unless you're talking about cnn.com. In most cases it's one of two things when that happens, anchor text or over-optimization on the target page, thus devaluing it enough to disqualify it from the query... but we're all guessing here. (one thing that would tell you more, is looking at what traffic/rankings the target pages ARE getting now, even though they don't match up with your intended keywords or verticals)

As an aside, I've never understood why these threads pop up, where the OP is on their last leg, and pretty much has nothing to lose, but doesn't post the site. Some advice, even my own comments, could be more harmful than helpful if you're not careful.

For anyone else that comes across this in the future, if you simply post your site and the problematic details using images and no archive them, you can delete them after we help you... and you'll actually get a real solution to your problem. (yes I'm aware of the vultures. It's risk vs reward when you're foundation is crumbling all around you)