When two or more pages on your own site target the same keyword and intent, so they compete with each other and neither performs as well as one strong page would.
Example
Meera has a blog post 'Best summer cotton kurtas' and a category page 'Summer cotton kurtas'. Google keeps swapping which one it shows, and both hover on page two.
How you'll hear it
“Those two pages are cannibalising each other. Merge them and redirect the weaker one.”
What it helps you decide
Whether to merge pages, redirect one to the other, or give each a clearly different keyword and intent.
Where people misread it
People see two of their URLs ranking for one query and call it cannibalisation. Often it is harmless, or even good, if both pages rank well or serve different intents. Ahrefs advises acting only when the overlap is clearly hurting performance, and warns against fixes like noindexing or deleting pages.
The story
Two pages, one search
In Search Console, Meera filters the query 'summer cotton kurtas' and looks at which of her pages got impressions over three months.
| Blog post: average position | 14 |
| Blog post: clicks in 3 months | 40 |
| Category page: average position | 16 |
| Category page: clicks in 3 months | 60 |
| Total clicks in 3 months | 100 |
|---|
Each page looks like it is doing a bit. Together they hide a problem: Google cannot tell which one she wants to rank, and the links and internal links are split between them.
The intent here is to shop, so the category page should win. She moves the useful styling tips from the blog into the category page, redirects the blog URL to it with a 301, and points her internal links at the category page.
She does not delete the blog without a redirect, and she does not noindex it. Either would throw away the links it had earned.
Figures are illustrative. Check whether the overlap is actually hurting results before merging; two pages ranking well for one query is not a problem.
Don't confuse it with
- Duplicate content: identical or near-identical pages. Cannibalisation can happen between quite different pages aiming at the same search.
Related terms
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Sources
- Keyword cannibalization: what it is and how to fix it, Ahrefs
- Redirects and Google Search, Google Search Central