My 'complete guide' is cannibalising my main product page and hurting rankings

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Hi everyone,

I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank.  It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there.  It works great and is getting lots of conversions.  But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks.

Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page.

I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes.

Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page.

I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'.  I've got the custom URL selected at the moment.  There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex.  If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box?

Thanks.

[evolvingSEO]

If Google is currently ranking both, I would actually leave it and let both of them be indexed and rank. I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Instead, I would be sure you're cross-linking between the two, and focus on user engagement for the traffic you are already getting (ie: goal completions, time on page etc) and focus on really satisfying the users who are landing on each result.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

My understanding of cannibalisation has just clicked, thanks.  But what about CTR? Will having two results not hurt the CTR of each and prevent me getting the number one spot?

I'm testing having the 'complete guide' downloads on the product pages and also combining some of the duplicate and triplicate results in serps but the results have not been great.  Even seen some negative flux.  But it's early days yet, less than a month.

Thanks for answering, I need to go away and read more about filtering.

[evolvingSEO]

Hello! Actually, often having more results can sometimes increase the CTR to either result

But either way I wouldn't be concerned about CTR in that sense. I would worry again about if users are enjoying your pages once they land on them.

You can, however, still work on improving CTR in general to both pages by making your titles and descriptions better - more clicks = more traffic anyway!