Cannibalization and ideal link pattern for higher keyword rankings

If you ask Kotler about cannibalization, he would probably say that it is the drop in margins and sales due to entry of new players in the market. But this phenomenon happens differently in our SEO industry and it plays a very important role in strategizing one’s link building campaign. So many times we come across people who just sprinkle their most important keywords all over their website and just sit back hoping that it’s enough for Google to start ranking their website for those scattered keywords. But by unplanned scattering of keywords, all they do is, confuse the crawlers and fail to rank for any of those targeted keywords. This is due to cannibalization effect.

Due to cannibalization effect, your website can face following setbacks:

• Internal linking: You dilute the keyword equity by using it in all the links on all the pages and as a result search engines fail to determine your most important keywords and pages. For eg. If your website is about cars, you should not link a page on ‘engines’ to ‘tyre’. Instead it is a better idea to link ‘engines’ page to ‘types of engines’ and ‘tyre’ to ‘types of tyres’

• External Linking: Same holds true when you try to link to external websites without understanding which keyword category the linking page is specifically targeting.

I don’t think it is possible to rank all the pages of your websites. When your content and keywords are all over the place, even the few back links produced are spread all over the place, which hardly benefits any page. So ideally you should try to focus on the most important pages while using other pages as a bait for crawlers to rank those important pages highest on search engines. You may also want to refer to Brett Tabke keyword pyramid, where he has explained the most rank boosting internal and external link pattern with nice diagrams. Even though it is a very old post but it still holds good and will definitely clarify all your doubts about linking of your website. Happy linking!