End Keyword Cannibalization and Duplicate Titles - Best SEO Practices
Keyword Cannibalization is the repeated use of certain keywords across the same website - which usually results in dupliate page titles as well. This causes the search engines to become confused as to which page is more important, an often results in both pages being ranked much lower - the value is split between them. Or worse, as Nikesh Parekh warns, can cause the searche engines to interpret the site as spamming.
I recently posted an article about basic Real Estate Agent SEO, where I also discuss the negative impacts of duplicate page titles. This is a very real hazard - and taking the time to create unique page titles could be all it takes to move up significantly in the rankings.
In our efforts to keep ActiveRain highly SEO friendly and to get our member blogs to the top of the search engines, we are working with a well-known SEO consultant here in Seattle. As I had mentioned previously, Google is frequently running its user experience and content optimization algorithm called Panda. Panda targets content farms and duplicate content and then ranks those site lower in the search results as Google believes that those sites have search spam.
Our consultant Susan found a number of interesting things within the 3 million pages of content indexed by the search engines.
MANY of our members will publish blogs with the same titles week after week. Examples include: Wordless Wednesday, Friday Funny, Market Update, etc. I understand why our members do this, like a regular column in a newspaper, BUT this often confuses the search engines. Even though the content of the blog post is different, since the title is the same AND used by many members of ActiveRain, the search engines could get confused and could label these posts as SPAM.
So, what to do? Very simple: Add the date to the title of your blog post or add additional description. Examples:
- Wordless Wednesday July 20, 2011: Blue Ocean and Grey Skies
- Market Update: Bellevue, WA July 20, 2011
- Friday Funny - A Laughing Horse
A small amount of extra text will prevent a world of confusion AND protect the content and our domain authority at ActiveRain!
Please re-blog and share so we can get the word out.
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