How to best correct cannibalization?

[UrbanityStudios]

I apologize if this has already been answered, but after reading several posts on cannibalization, I can't seem to find what I am looking for.

The site in question is www.urbanitystudios.com and in particular the term "western wedding invitation".  We rank in the top 30 for this term in Google, but Google has indexed a particular product, versus our western wedding invitation collection page.

The product that is indexed for this term:

http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/western-wedding-invitations-p-1527.html

The page that we would rather be indexed:

http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/western-wedding-invitations-c-95_179_181.html

After running an onpage report in SEOmoz tools for the collection page, we recieve an A grade, but get a warning on the cannibalization line item. As you can see, we name each product within that collection as "Western Wedding Invitation-x" (and have done this for other product categories...not good).  After a good head slap, we realized that we are confusing Google as to what should be the main page.

If we rename our products, the product's URL will change-Do we do a 301 for those products?

If we rename our products, do we take out the words "Western Wedding Invitation" entirely or can we say "x-Western Wedding Invitation"?

Or. because cannibalization is deemed a "low priority" in the reports, do we let things be and work on getting links to the collections page vs the individual product?

Any insight would be most appreciated.

[RyanKent]

Hi Meghann.

Your two pages represent a classic case of keyphrase cannibalization.

The page title of each page is identical: Western Wedding Invitations by UrbanityStudios

The H1 tag of each page is almost identical: Western Wedding Invitations - 1527a

The URL of each page is almost identical: http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/western-wedding-invitations-p-1527.html

To fix this issue, the first suggestion is to understand each page of your site should ideally target one keyphrase. That phrase (or a very close variation) should be used in the page title, h1 tag and content. If that same phrase is used elsewhere on your site, it should ideally be an anchor text link to the correct page.

Based on your question the root cause of the issue is you have two products named "Western Wedding Invitations". Even though each product has a different id number, there is not enough differentiation to help any search engine understand your wishes.

To fix the problem, keep the name on the page you wish to be indexed and change the product name for the other page. Perhaps "Country Wedding Invitation" could work? For the purposes of this reply I'll use that as an example.

Change your product name to Country Wedding Invitation. You stated that change would cause the URL to change automatically. Next, change the page title, h1 tag, content, alt tags, etc. to support the new name. 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. Once Google crawls your site it will recognize the change and fix the problem. Your results may bounce around a bit for a month, but then they should settle down.

[UrbanityStudios]

Thank you very much for the response.  One reason we named our products "Western Wedding Invitations" and "Western Wedding Invitation-Wheat" is because of Google base---thought that would return good results (which for product 1527 it has).  Could we not change the name so drastically to "Country Wedding Invitations" but instead to "Western Wedding Invitation-Wanted Sign" or something like that? Is that enough of a differentiation from Western Wedding Invitations?  Thanks so much.

[RyanKent]

Yes. It is enough to differentiate by adding a single work like "Wheat" or "Wanted Sign" to the phrase.

A word of caution. When using two phrases on your site where Phrase A is a subset of Phrase B, it is very important to ensure your Title, Header Tag, ALT tags, Content and Internal Linking all support this effort.

Phrase A "Country Wedding Invitation". Page Title "Country Wedding Invitation", H1 tag "Country Wedding Invitations", use the term at least twice in content with the first use in the first sentence, and then one time on this page offer an anchor text link to Page B such as "If you liked this page you may want to check out our Country Wedding Invitation - Wheat page" where the "Country Wedding Invitation - Wheat" is an anchor text link to that page.

The Phrase B page is treated exactly the same but replace "Country Wedding Invitation" with "Country Wedding Invitation - Wheat".

Don't forget to adjust ALT tags too. It would be helpful if at least some external links used this keyword as well. This is the hard part about your chosen phrase. It is likely people will link with "Western Wedding Invitation" to the "Wheat" page instead of "Western Wedding Invitation - Wheat". Ideally whatever you name your product needs to be something users will accept and use.

[UrbanityStudios]

After reading your post and processing through the information we have started to change some of our keyword phrases within our category pages. However, we now have run up against a possible issue of more cannibalization items. I will try to explain what we think will happen if we do the following:

We created a category called Cupcake Invitations and have optimized the page for that keyword phrase. We have placed five products within this category and are very unclear as to how we should name each product.  We would like to do one of two things (or whatever would work best).  One idea would be to adjust their names so their URL contains “cupcake invitations”. The reason for this is because if we don’t add in “cupcake invitations” to our product name, our URL would look like this:

http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/pink-plaid-p-####.html instead of

http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/pink-plaid-cupcake-invitations-p-####.html

Question #1-Add the category name to the end of the product name?

Would we serve or hinder ourselves to name the product something like “pink plaid cupcake invitation” (which would be an H3 on the category page of “Cupcake Invitations”)i.e.. we think we would serve ourselves that if someone searches for “cupcake invitation” in say Googlebase, these products would show up.  But would we hinder ourselves if we name all five products with some “product-name-cupcake-invitation” will we not run into keyword stuffing and cannibalization among the product pages? Especially when we grow that category with more cupcake themed products?

Question #2-If no, add the category name as an H1 on the individual product page?  We have seen many top ranking competitors in our field use this strategy.

We would name the product just “pink plaid” so that on the “cupcake invitations” page, the link “pink plaid” isn’t confusing or cannibalizing.  Then, on the actual product page pull in the category name of “cupcake invitations” (H1) next to the product name (H2).

Clear as mud? I am probably making this much harder than it actually is, but any clarification would help. Thank you!

[RyanKent]

The idea behind cannibalization is you do not want multiple pages on your site discussing the exact same topic. If the same topic needs to be discussed, then some slant on the topic should be established so search engines and users can differentiate between the two pages. Instead of making a second "Wedding Invitations" page you could focus on "2012 Wedding Invitations" or "10 Best Wedding Invitations".

This is where I pause for a moment and confess my ignorance. I have no idea what a "cupcake invitation" is, and my mother and sister aren't available to help. I google'd it and still am not quite clear on the concept. What's missing is the wikipedia page, which is a GREAT opportunity for you! Go to wikipedia, create a quality "cupcake invitation page" and include 2 links to your site, but try to include links to other high quality sites which discuss the topic as well. If you don't already have such a page on your site, you may want to make a "Man's Guide to Invitations". It can be a simple, one page article to help those who are not familiar with the terms and etiquette get by. Alternatively a glossary page could be offered. Make sure the page you link to from wikipedia is a very high quality page, preferable without ads and a "buy now" focus.

For this reply please allow me to replace the "cupcake invitation" with "wedding invitation". Using that category, you have some products such as "pink-plaid".

For your first question, it is up to you how to combine the category and product. The normal URL presentation would be category first followed by product such as /wedding-invitations/pink-plaid. That type of setup is generally easy to implement and well understood by users. You can create alterations but they often don't scale so well to other categories.

For your second question, I would suggest including the category name in the H1 tag. A "pink plaid" page in and of itself does not hold a lot of meaning. I presume you could have wedding invitations, baby announcements and other categories with a "pink plaid" page. You need to differentiate them by adding the category name such as "Pink Plaid Wedding Invitations".