Every time a redirect is executed, the server must access one site and automatically take you to another.
This may increase the loading time of the page in question.
Additionally, it is proven that google stops following redirects after a certain amount.
In fact, it is recommended to track the links to the "old" pages (2 and 3) and manually modify them to the url we want to focus on (1).
However, in some cases this may not be possible due to volume or other limitations.
In this sense, we would not penalize the "other" pages in the rankings, we would simply eliminate them from them in favor of the content in which we really want to rank.
canonical links are tags that act as a suggestion to norway mobile phone number google, indicating that, although we allow the indexing of a certain content, the content that is really relevant for that keyword is another one.
In our case, we could apply the canonical tag on content 2 and 3, pointing to 1 as the relevant page.
Before taking this action, the following must be taken into consideration:
disadvantages of the canonical tag
using the canonical attribute does not transfer authority from one page to another.
Posts that are not used to rank will be considered "secondary content" by google, which will likely result in losing your rankings.
However, the authority they have accumulated while online will not be leveraged to improve the pagerank of our page 1.
Google interprets the canonical attribute as a "hint," which means it won't necessarily stop indexing old results.
In general, the canonical attribute tends to be more of a solution for problems like duplicate content or “thin” content, rather than keyword cannibalization issues.
Advantages of the canonical tag
on the other hand, the content of 2 and 3 does not disappear and will continue to be accessible to users.
We can duplicate 2 and 3 content in 1 without worrying about internal duplicate content.
For example, we could keep the blog post with its comments and also copy them as quality content on page 1.
Incorporate the "noindex" tag
another alternative is to apply the "noindex" tag to urls where keywords that you want to rank for with other content are repeated.
This way, search engines will ignore them and not show them in search results.
This solution is particularly useful for e-commerce sites, which can disable product page indexing in order to rank categories directly.
Using the right link building
finally, make sure you make proper use of link building , both internal and external.
This will help both google and users to clearly identify what is important content on your website and which urls are ranking for certain keywords.
Additionally, this will help remove any ambiguity in the content.
It is crucial to avoid confusing the user, as the same set of keywords with different content can lead them to not know exactly which url they will find the information they are looking for.
If this happens, the user's decision will be simple: move on to the next result and not click through to your website.
Designing an effective sitemap
an effective sitemap can be a useful tool to prevent seo cannibalization.
This allows search engines to understand the structure of your website and find all your pages.
Therefore, we recommend that you keep your sitemap up to date and ensure that all your pages are linked correctly.