Google’s Hummingbird and Keyword Cannibalization

[Adnan.Hassan.Khan]

My client wants to have keywords added on every product  with the product name , apparently some seo guru told him that hummingbird is all about key phrases and long tail keywords.

As i know hummingbird lends to understand the intent and contextual meaning of the query.

The issue is if I  add the keywords on for e.g oak furniture on all of my product title,And we are using zen-cart platform and  it will change the internal anchor text on the product listing page.  It  will cause a Cannibalization issue.

Question1. I just need help to reply to client that adding keyword can cause detrimental to ranking.

Question 2. If i am wrong then do we need to re optimise the site.

I have read http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Many thanks.

[George.Fanucci]

Hi Adnan,

If I understand your question, you have a page for each specific product, yes? So, you may want THAT page to rank better than most of your OTHER pages, for a specific search query relevant to the name of that product?

This is a very common issue for any shopping cart system. So, any good shopping cart CMS would be SEO friendly enough to ensure the product name is used prominently in the page title tag, and in an H1 or H2 heading tag, IMG alt tag, etc... Then, it's up to you to have a high-quality and relevant product description (page text) that uses good SEO for your important and related keywords and interesting content. That is what's important for on-page SEO.

I am not yet sure how hummingbird would affect this, just use the basic SEO good practices for on-page content, and you should do well.

The question then becomes, have you prioritized your keywords, including long-tail, for each product and it's own webpage? Have you optimized your content accordingly?

Hope that helps.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Adnan

To answer you firstly on Hummingbird and SEO Guru's opinion, yes, it's correct in part, but your client should not get caught up with idea that responding to Hummingbird requires a new SEO magic trick. Hummingbird is the evolution of what Google has been doing for quite a while meaning that today SEO is not so much about saying how do I target this or that keyword, but rather how you answer the questions your target customers are asking.

So whilst including keywords or phrases into a page Title tag is still relevant, it's not about top loading pages, but making sure the whole page is targeted which actually could mean, in terms of that page's content, that you are targeting multiple key phrases.

You are right in saying you shouldn't just be repeating one key phrase such as "oak furniture" across all pages. A Title tag is like the title of a page in a book. It tells the visitor and the search engine what that page is about which then of course needs to be backed up by the content on that page. So all pages on a site cannot be just about "oak furniture".

Having said that, it may be that your client's site could do with an SEO makeover and as such that may mean updating some page Titles and consequently the page URLs. If that happens, you will need to use 301 redirects to make sure old page URLs are redirected to the new page URLs.

I hope the above helps,
Peter

[Adnan.Hassan.Khan]

Thanks Peter for your Answer.

The issue is there are about 4000 products and having keyword oak furniture adding to each of the product name will cause issues. As i think if i want to rank for keyword oak furniture  then 4000 pages will be competing for the word "Oak furniture"

[crackingmedia]

Yes I agree. By all means have something on the general site pages that the company supply "oak furniture", but on the products pages themselves it will be enough to have something like oak sideboard, oak cabinet, oak table etc as appropriate.

Peter

[RuthBurrReedy]

Tell your client he is on the right track with wanting to target long tail keywords (that will make his ego feel better) but that it's not so simple as adding one keyword to all the pages. After you choose which page to rank for "oak furniture" (my guess would be the home page or main oak furniture page), choose which long tail phrases containing oak furniture you want to rank for, then choose pages (if different from the main oak furniture page) that would be a good fit. For example, you may have different pages for "discount oak furniture" vs. "taking care of your oak furniture." Do the same with other variations like oak table, oak chair, etc. I would recommend doing this keyword research first and then taking that to the client with a plan of action.

If this is too manual, try using your existing product browsing categories as top-level keywords (so all the oak chairs have "oak chair" in the title, etc). This will get you a bit more granular than just blanketing the site with the broadest possible term. Your client should still be prepared that only one or two pages from the site will rank for that broad of a term.