Type the phrase "SEO freelancing" into Google.
Here are two different posts from the Ahrefs blog at positions 7 and 8:
Rankings are constantly changing, so don't be surprised if your list of taiyuan cell phone numbers results are different. This is because you were targeting the same keyword on different pages.
And the more of you there are in the search results, the better.
So why might this be a problem, even a potential one?
Three words: keyword cannibalization.
What is keyword cannibalization and why is it bad?
Imagine a situation where a site — say ahrefs.com — accidentally targets the same keywords in different posts. Most SEOs are convinced that this is confusing Google.
Image taken from diggitymarketing.com
(Two similar content causes confusion)
SEOs believe that it is becoming more difficult for Google to determine which page is worth showing for a given keyword (or whether it is worth showing at all). As a result, it may turn out that none of the pages will appear in the search results.
As a rule, this happens by mistake.
Patrick Stox, a columnist for Search Engine Land ( SEL ), explains why:
“I’ve heard arguments where people claim that having multiple pages with the same terms confuses search engines. This sounds absurd. Search engines know what’s on each individual page. Some people claim that Google sometimes shows the wrong page for a given query, but this is also a fallacy. Just because you think a page is perfect doesn’t mean a search engine will find it relevant to the query. The search query is key. If the information on the page is irrelevant, or gets lost in instructions and Wikipedia citations, the page will likely not show up in the results.”
As Patrick points out, Google is pretty smart. In most cases, it can figure out what your page is about, whether it matches the search query, and whether the user intent is right for it. So, you can't force Google to return product pages for informational queries.
Let's look at the results for the query "best business card ideas". The first 10 results are blog posts formatted as lists. And not a single product page.
And here is what Google returned for a Russian language request:
And here we come back to search intent: people who search for information based on a given condition do not want to buy anything.
But that doesn't mean keyword cannibalization isn't a problem.
Two Reasons Why Cannibalization Is Bad For Your Site
1. The unwanted page may be ranked higher than the one you want
For example, the one that you really want to get to the top of search results.
Google the query “competitor backlink analysis” and you will see these two posts in positions 6 and 7:
