Cannibalization

Cannibalization is what happens when several pages of one site compete for the same searches. Google splits the impressions and clicks between them, each page ranks lower than one strong page would, and the site as a whole earns less traffic than its content deserves. RankYak checks your site for cannibalization every day and proposes a way to consolidate.

The issues appear in the Cannibalization section of the audit page. Detection needs no crawling and no audit setup, so it runs for every project, whether or not you have configured the page audit.

What is detected

Two kinds of competition are detected.

• Several articles on one keyword. RankYak groups keywords that share the same search results into clusters, and each cluster is meant to be covered by a single article. When a cluster holds more than one published article, typically articles written before clustering existed, those articles compete with each other by construction.
• Pages competing in search results. When your project has a Search Console connection, RankYak also looks at the searches your site appears for. When several of your pages keep splitting the impressions on the same searches, whether RankYak wrote them or not, they are flagged together as one issue.

An issue stays open until you handle it or until a later check no longer detects the competition, in which case it resolves on its own.

Reviewing an issue

Clicking an issue shows the competing pages side by side: each page's clicks, impressions, and average position from the past four weeks, the keyword it targets, and when it was published. RankYak proposes which page to keep, preferring the page that earns real clicks and, when clicks are too few to judge by, the page Google already shows most. Of course, the proposal is only a starting point; you may pick a different winner before resolving.

Consolidating

The fix for cannibalization is consolidation: keep the strongest page and point the others at it.

• Archive the losing articles. For losing pages that are RankYak articles, Archive & resolve archives them. An archived article stays live on your site, but RankYak stops refreshing and rewriting it and stops linking to it from new articles. Archiving is reversible: you may unarchive an article at any time from its page.
• Create the redirects. The issue lists a 301 redirect for each losing page, pointing its URL at the winner. You should create these redirects in your CMS or wherever your site manages redirects; a 301 passes the losing page's ranking signals to the winner, which is what makes the consolidation work. RankYak cannot create redirects on your site itself.

Once the redirects are in place, Google gradually shifts the combined demand onto the remaining page. Typically, its position improves over the following weeks as the signals consolidate.

If a losing page is not a RankYak article, there is nothing to archive; you consolidate it the same way, with a redirect, and click Mark as solved once you have.

Sometimes competing pages are competing on purpose, for example when two pages serve clearly different intents that happen to share a search. If you would like to keep them as they are, you may dismiss the issue; it moves to the handled list and does not return.

Archived articles

Archived articles keep their place in your article list, marked with an Archived badge, and you may filter the list to see them. They are excluded from refreshes, rewrites, and internal linking, and the content plan never schedules new work for them. Unarchiving an article returns it to normal maintenance.

Detecting and resolving cannibalization uses no credits.