May 26, 2020

How to Avoid Cluster Keyword Cannibalization

8 minutes

Sponsored by Ezoic

Show Notes:

I've done the dumbest stuff imaginable in an effort to scoop up Google traffic.
Let me tell you about one example that if there were a Google penalty Darwin awards, I might just win.
The year was 2011.
I owned a couple niche sites making decent money. I even won a free treadmill for selling the most treadmills as an affiliate.
I've used it twice.

I spent more time spinning content for link building software than publishing good content.
Flush with success with spinners ad software, I decided to tackle something bigger. I was invincible; a visionary SEO.
The reverse phone lookup niche.
CPA affiliate offers were plentiful. All people had to do was fill in a form to look up cell phone numbers and I earned money. In theory that is.
I had a plan.

My eyes were bigger than my stomach.
My plan was to target every town and city in the US With 50,000 or more people. That amounted to hundreds of pages which you guessed it, would have the same content.
Surprise surprise the entire site was deindexed before it made a nickel.
That's my sad story for the day.
That is also how NOT to publish article clusters.

What is a cluster?
A series of articles that cover a topic in-depth.
Reader question:
Keyword cannibalism. You say to carpet bomb a popular topic. So if I have a post on, say, X, would it hurt to use the same keyword X in multiple posts? Do I need to use long tail keywords?I am confused because I have heard from others NOT to reuse the same keyword or your overall ranking for that post will drop.

Keyword cannibalization is bad.
Duplicate content (similar articles on the same site) is bad.
Publishing the most thorough, in-depth series of articles on a topic is good.
Short answer: It is perfectly okay to include the same seed keyword in multiple articles. The long tail aspect of it will determine whether the articles are the same or different.

How do you determine if two long tail keywords are the same or different?
The answer is you must assess user intent. Fancy words for a simple concept.
When I'm considering two long tail keywords and whether they are essentially the same or different I ask myself "when people search both phrases, are they essentially seeking the same information or is it totally different?"
Here's an example.
Seed keyword: Ice cream

That's a big keyword weighing in at 328,000 monthly searches. There are many long tails that could and should form many different articles.
But let's start with an example of two ice cream long tail keywords that are essentially the same based on intent:

Ice cream recipe
How to make ice cream

While those two phrases are different, the meaning is the same. One person searching for "ice cream recipe" is looking for the same thing as another person searching with "how to make ice cream".

Now, here are examples of long tail keywords, all with ice cream in it, that could be individual articles with no threat of cannibalization because they are very different topics.