Keyword cannibalisation

[JohnHillman]

We created a product blog page that was highly optimized for SEO based on a recommendation from a colleague. These are now our best performing pages - however they do not convert as highly as the bona-fide product pages. After further investigation we're concerend that we shouldn't have split our content accross two pages - keyword cannibalisation. Is this correct and should we 301 our product blog pages to the other high converting pages?

[RyanKent]

Hi Sally.

Without looking at the page it is hard to offer specific advise. If you can share an example product and blog URL, we can gain a better understanding of your implementation.

Using a generic example, let's say you are selling Cheerios.Your primary product page might be titled "Cheerios" and offer all the basic information about Cheerios such as it's ingredients, nutritional facts information, how many ounces are in the box, etc.

If you wrote a blog article, you would not want to duplicate your product page content. It can be very helpful to address topics such as "Cheerios and a Healthy Heart Diet".

Each page on your site should focus one or two keywords or phrases. Internal anchor text links are very helpful in helping avoid cannibalization issues and ensure the correct page is indexed for a given term. The important piece is your blog articles need to have a different focus then your product page.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

While I agree with Ryan in how to prevent the issue in the future, I think what you want addressed is what to do about it now (and you can work towards prevention in the future).

By "performing" you mean "ranking" yes?  I would suggest asking, why isn't the product page ranking better? This is a sign there is something not working about the product page. It could be the content (maybe there's not enough or maybe its not the right content) or it could be a technical issue (not crawlable etc).

Also, is the blog a wordpress installation in a "/blog/" folder of some sort, or is the entire website on the same platform?  Often a WordPress section will rank well, while the custom portaion of a website is not as sound technically.

I'd start with a good look into why the actual product page does not rank for what it should. The blog page ranking is only a sign something deeper is not right.

-Dan

[malachiii]

came to agree on this..  focus on differentiation sans the hannibal lector aspects of keywords.