In the digital world, businesses often fight for landing their websites on top search results by including various ad words. Some might think this is "clever" because the more keywords you included, the higher the chance for your website to be seen. However, the fact is of the opposite: too many keywords or even identical keywords in different subpages of your site would cause problems like subpages competing against each other or risking Google bots to think that your website is spamming.
What is Keyword Cannibalisation?
Keyword cannibalisation refers to a situation where two or more of your pages from the same website compete against each other for the same keyword (in paid PPC campaign) or two or more pages of your site being shown in the search result under the same query/keyword searches (in SEO's organic content). Ultimately, the performance of the PPC campaign could be hampered and disrupted, thus leading to your profit being cannibalised.
Risk of Keyword Cannibalisation
Having various pages in the same site competing with one another could bring harms to your website and risk both reputation and potential yield to your business.
When more than one webpages have resulted under the same keywords, the algorithms of the search engine you are using might post different rankings to different pages. In this case, you would not be able to decide which page to be ranked higher or lower, which may result in a page with weaker effort and effectiveness being ranked higher than those pages that actually deliver. As a result, it could negatively affect the conversion rate of those keywords in your webpage.
As the Google bots would scan through all websites every year, it might consider this case as "keyword stuffing", meaning that the website is being filled with the same keywords here and there in hopes of achieving a higher ranking. From this, the bots could identify your website as a spamming site and eventually decrease your website's overall ranking.
To Conclude...
Keyword cannibalisation is a common issue that can be found on many websites. To keep up with the ever-changing and fast-growing digital world, you should manage and check the performance of your PPC campaign and relevancy between your content and keyword(s) regularly to avoid keyword cannibalisation.
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