Competing Pages for Ranking Keywords?

[naturalsociety]

Hey there,

My client has this existing page which ranks for rentals-related keywords that are product type specific - i.e. electric wheelchair rentals, mobility scooter rentals, etc.

https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/pages/rentals

I recently made a rentals page for each product type to try and really target those keywords that the rentals page is ranking for.

Is this a problem? Is the potential nature of the pages competing for the keywords a real issue?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

• Mike

[Advanced-Air-Ambulance]

No, thankfully you don't encounter the issue of cannibalization between pages. Google or other search engines may use the more targeted page if it's determined to be more relevant , however if it's not determined to be more relevant you will get the page that's already ranked. It won't pull your other page down, however if you are just duplicating the content from the main page, the search engine may choose to skip indexing the new pages overall.

Overall, this should help and not hurt.

[naturalsociety]

Thanks for the reply =]

[R0bin_L0rd]

I'm not sure I agree here - I have seen a few cases where pages which aren't exact duplicates compete with each other for specific keywords and end up dragging each other down. Removing that competition helped push us from page 3 to around position 5.

That's not to say that this will definitely be a problem for you, I just couldn't say that it definitely won't. If I were you I'd use a rank tracking tool to monitor which pages are ranking for the keywords you care about, and how well. If you keep an eye out for cannibalisation then you can take quick action. If you end up just ranking better then you don't need to do anything.

Appreciate that's a bit of a noncommittal answer but hopefully it helps!

[Advanced-Air-Ambulance]

Yeah, I don't disagree with you. Algorithmic filtering and ranking doesn't work exactly as intended, and there are ways to work around it as you point out. Generally, cannibalization shouldn't occur, but it does happen in some circumstances.