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. Cannibalization Guard finds these fights, judges them against Google's live results, and hands you a plan to consolidate.

Resolving them needs Site Guard, the $99-a-month add-on covering both Guards on one site. You may add it on the Site Guard page itself; see billing for how the charge works. Without it, a site still sees how many fights it has. What it does not get is which pages are fighting, or the plan.

It lives on the Cannibalization Guard tab of the Site Guard page. It needs no crawling and no page selection, so it works whether or not you have configured Page Guard. Like Page Guard, it is built on your site's search performance data, so it requires a Search Console connection.

The audit

RankYak looks for cannibalization every night, and judges what it finds as soon as your search data shows a fight, so you do not have to ask. With Site Guard on the site, Run cannibalization audit does the same pass immediately, which is worth doing after you have consolidated a group and want the confirmation now. Either way it produces two lists.

• The consolidation plan. Sets of pages the audit confirmed serve one search demand, so keeping them separate only splits their strength. Each set carries a proposed winner and a ready-made redirect list.
• The watch list. Pages that overlap on some searches but serve their own demands. Merging them would trade two rankings for one, so no action is needed; each later run checks them again.

Under the hood, the audit looks for two kinds of competition: keyword clusters holding more than one published article, which compete by construction, and sets of pages splitting impressions on the same searches in your Search Console data, whether RankYak wrote them or not. It judges each set by taking every page's strongest search from your search data and checking what Google actually returns for those searches, and it also sweeps your written articles for duplicates your search data cannot show: when Google has already settled a contest by suppressing one page, Search Console reports no fight, but the duplicate still holds your site back.

The audit shows its work. Each entry lists the searches it probed and how much of Google's top results they share, so you can see why a set of pages landed in the plan rather than on the watch list, and check the reasoning against your own knowledge of the content.

Each run starts from the current state of your search data and re-checks every open entry as well: an entry whose competition has disappeared, because you consolidated or the pages stopped ranking together, is resolved automatically, and any new overlap is judged in the same pass. A fight already judged is not judged twice.

The consolidation plan

After an audit, the issues marked for consolidation group into a plan: pages that serve the same demand appear together, however many issues they came from, with one proposed winner per group. Resolving a group archives every losing RankYak article behind the winner and lists the 301 redirects to create, in a single step, so untangling a whole family of overlapping pages does not take a dozen rounds. The handled list keeps the same shape: a set you resolve or dismiss together stays together as one entry, so past consolidations read the way you made them.

Reviewing an entry

Clicking a plan or watch entry shows the competing pages side by side: each page's clicks, impressions, and average position from the past 30 days, its strongest search, and when it was published. For plan entries, 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; the entry states which of these signals decided. 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 optimizing 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. Each issue shows a chart of every competing page's impressions over the past six months, so before a resolve you can see the split as it stands, and after one you can watch the demand converge onto the winner.

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 resolved 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 entry; 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 optimizations and internal linking, and the content plan never schedules new work for them. Unarchiving an article returns it to normal maintenance.