Keyword cannibalisation: when your own pages compete with each other

What cannibalisation is, and what it is not

“Cannibalisation seo” is searched 90 times a month in France, often by shop and blog owners who see their rankings swing for no obvious reason.

The typical sign: for the same search, the page Google shows changes from one week to the next, and the ranking yo-yos. Google understands that your site covers the topic, but does not know which page to offer, and spreads its signals across several average pages instead of one good one.

It is not cannibalisation when two pages answer two different intents, even with similar words: “compact pushchair” (I want to buy) and “how to fold a pushchair” (I want an answer). They can coexist and link to each other.

The most common causes on a site that sells

• Product variants on separate pages: one page per colour or size, with almost identical text.
• Overlapping categories and subcategories: “summer dresses” and “light dresses” showing the same products.
• Blog posts that repeat the sales page: a “best cordless vacuum” article competing with the cordless vacuum category.
• City pages with no content of their own: twenty “plumber in …” pages where only the city name changes.
• Content produced in series on the same keyword over the years, by different writers.
• Indexed filters and parameters: the same product list reachable at ten addresses.

Spot it in Search Console, in twenty minutes

1. 1
   Open Performance: the “Search results” report, last 3 months.
2. 2
   Filter a query that matters to you (Queries tab, “contains” filter), then open the Pages tab: if several pages of your site get impressions on that same query, you have a lead.
3. 3
   Compare over time: switch to a period comparison. One page gaining impressions while the other loses them, on the same query, confirms that Google is hesitating.
4. 4
   Check the intent: read both pages as a customer would. Do they answer the same question? If so, that is cannibalisation; if not, differentiate their titles and first sentences more clearly.
5. 5
   Look for duplicate titles: two pages with almost the same title are almost always competing.

Four ways to fix it, from the strongest to the lightest

1. 1
   Merge: choose the page that should win (the one with the most impressions, links or sales), move the best content of the others into it, then 301 redirect the others to it. This is the most common cure.
2. 2
   Differentiate: if both pages have a reason to exist, rewrite titles, first sentences and content so that they answer two clearly distinct intents, and link them to each other.
3. 3
   Declare a canonical: for variants that must stay accessible (a colour with its own address), set the address of the main page as the canonical on each of them.
4. 4
   Remove: a weak page, with no visits or links, that adds nothing to the main page, leaves the site with a 410 code.

What we observed when merging

On 3 of our own sites, we merged page variants that answered the same intent with 301 redirects on 22 and 23 September 2026, keeping their content in the remaining page. Over the following 28 days, all three sites came back clearly in Google:

Prevent it: one search, one page

The best fix is the one you never have to make. Keep a simple keyword map: one line per target search, with a single page next to it.

• Before writing a page, check in the map that no existing page already targets the same intent; if one does, enrich it instead.
• An advice article links to the page that sells, it does not repeat it.
• One page per product, with variants as options.
• One page per area only when it has content specific to that area.

This is how this site works: each guide targets a distinct family of searches, documented before writing, so that none competes with another.