 Hey MOSFANS, how's it going? My name's John Earnshaw. I'm the Chief Product Evangelist at Pi Data Metrics and today I'm going to be talking about a subject that is super close to my heart and it's been close to my heart for over 15 years when I was analyzing the SERP one day and I started to discover this unusual flux and what I was seeing was content that was doing really well on page one and suddenly it drops and then after a few weeks we noticed that it wasn't dropping for no reason. This content was dropping due to other content somehow conflicting. Now we know there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty and Google's always said that but what we have understood since then is that Google and other search engines as well are becoming increasingly sensitive to content of a similar nature and that's what cannibalization is all about. So today we're going to take a look at how you identify it briefly because you can do that with tools. I'm going to show you how you fix it and finally how you prevent it from happening in the first place and if you get that bit right you obviously don't need to worry about one or two. So cannibalization there are three types. Well there are more but there are three types that we kind of need to be aware of The first one is internal conflict or cannibalization. I use those terms interchangeably and that's where your content conflicts with itself. Then we have international conflict and that's a totally different kettle of fish because that's dealt with for example by hreflang. So we'll keep that out of the mix and then we have subdomain conflict and subdomain conflict is something that will always happen. For example if you have a help subdomain help.mysight.com and you've got content on there that's similar to the content on your main domain that's always going to conflict but we're not going to talk about that today. Really we're going to talk about internal conflict and how you fix it to start with. So let's imagine you wake up one day you were on page one for men's blazers. We all want to be on page one if we're selling men's blazers and then suddenly you notice your content drops and then when you take a closer look you might discover that you have multiple URLs returning over a period of time for the same keyword and a point to note about cannibalization it happens at 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 one 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 because if we don't make a decision on which one is the doorway into our ecosystem then google's going to make that decision for us and we're going to end up in a situation of cannibalization cannibalization it could be in line it could all be happening at the bottom of page one and sometimes people say well i'm on page one 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 they find it again oh it's a different page and 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 and 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 in their own right and then we have choices to make one possible choice and i've seen a lot of clients do this is to actually merge one of the older bits of content and put that in 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 and what are we doing what 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 know 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 and 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 and 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 are going to make sense of and google's going to make sense of it 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 you've got a number of choices and finally my favorite part how do you prevent it how do we not have to go through this and this well the key to preventing it really is to employ one of the four pillars of contextual optimization and contextual optimization is all about optimizing in the context of the SERP optimizing in the context of your competitors optimizing in the context of google's algorithms and optimizing in the context of your ecosystem so what we mean here is about before I inject any new content on the subject of men's blazers into my ecosystem I've got to stop and think and ask the question is there anything within my ecosystem that is potentially conflicting that's the first question you asked because if there are other pieces of content in the ecosystem with men's blazers in the title chances are they are going to conflict and you may end up taking one page of page one of google and your page never gets to page one so you may lose out all over so a really simple way of analyzing your ecosystem is with a site operator with a site operator so site colon www.mysite.com in title and you bring in in title and we're looking for in inverted commas men's blazers because that's going to return all the pages from your site the google's index that have men's blazers in the title remember the strongest theme so we might find before we inject a new content hey I've got abc and d in my ecosystem so we then go back here and we make the decision and if this is a new piece of content I can start to adopt and deploy one or more of these techniques to prevent it from happening in the first place and honestly cannibalization of content is causing so much loss of visibility I'd estimate some around 40 percent of content that's sitting on page two and three is down to this identify the conflicts once we've done that we identify the compliments how do you identify the compliments and why well I'll tell you why because when you put a new piece of content into your ecosystem to go still alongside these it needs authority if it's going to perform well and the best and quickest way of authority is to get that from other pages on the related theme that talk about blazers or men's style or men's fashion and we do another site operator here site colon www.mysite.com forget the title let's look for men's blazers in the body copy and we can do that and we can find compliments once you found the compliments you want to create links using men's blazers as the anchor text to your new piece of content and how do you find older pieces of content in inverted commas 2019 or 2018 add that you'll suddenly start to find older content that you totally forgotten about and in addition to those links that are going to inject authority you can then add some redirects and really in a nutshell that's all there is to it identifying fixing and preventing and I guarantee these are all going to work for you thanks for watching