Is Your Site Suffering From Keyword Cannibalization?

I looked at a site yesterday of a reader that was asking why some of his pages were not ranking better. The site had good backlinks, fairly good SEO, nice link juice flow and the home page was ranking very well for it's term. Taking a closer look at the structure and keyword focus, including the meta tags. It was clear that the site was suffering from keyword cannibalization.

For those that need a better understanding, I will point you to 2 articles that will better desrcibe it:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-cannibalization-and-how-to-handle-it/8084/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Some of the sites internal pages were clearly focusing on some of the same keywords and thus Google was confused and deemed the pages not relevant. Do not feel bad, as some of my older sites, even high ranking ones, suffer from it as well. I just need to get back to them and tightly focus them. Usually the structure of the sites need to be changed as well. This involves going from broad to specific. If you need to change the url structure as part of the process, you can merely do a 301 redirect from the old to new page. It will take some work if the entire site needs to be restructured, but you should see some near instant results if you take the time to properly reorganize the site. Have a look at a few of your own sites. Do they suffer from keyword cannibalization, now that you know what to look for?

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