Okay how do I fix this cannibalization error?

[678648631264]

Okay so check it out.

I already have the problem where my main page shows 3 of my posts of 3 popular posts and the SEOmoz optimization tool tells my there are like 60 keyword occurances? for the damn page so I had to make it look damn ugly for my views and lowered it to 1 post and 2 popular posts. Can I fix that?

Another thing - The SEOMOZ tool keeps telling me I have this cannibalization crap on all my posts because my homepage in the upper left corner has the keyword in it and in the footer of the template, my homepage title shows up (Keyword). What the heck do I do to fix this?

And also another question - I have my main page AND 1 of my posts ranking for the same keyword. Is there a problem?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

This is a common problem: You link out to your popular post, and they all contain the keyword you are trying to rank for, and this causes cannibalization problems.

1. One solution is to change the title of your posts, or at least the links going out to them. So if you run a shoe store, you might drop the "shoes" from the outgoing links and truncate all the links to "Nike Mens" "Adidas Womans" etc.

2. If you want your homepage to rank for this keyword, it's not a problem. That said, I've seen a lot of instances of de-optimizing these sitewide links by removing keywords actually show an improvement in rankings. You can try experimenting by changing the keyword (or adding a nofollow) to these links and see what happens.

3. No, not at all. As long as the page you want to rank higher is ranking higher, this just means you own more of the SERPs, and will get a higher click-through. If you want to change this, it often helps to add a partial-match link from the 2nd page to the first, to indicate to both Google and users what the correct page should be.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.