What to do about keyword cannibalism?

Unlock business potential through effective first dataset management solutions.
Post Reply
tasmi1234
Posts: 114
Joined: Thu Dec 26, 2024 3:13 am

What to do about keyword cannibalism?

Post by tasmi1234 »

Apart from identifying where keyword cannibalism actually occurs, we need to think about what technical means we have at our disposal to deal with this issue:

Robots.txt
meta tag "noindex"
canonical tag
merging content
internal link strategy
Robots.txt
A robots.txt is a text file, often placed in the root directory of the server, that tells search engine crawlers whether URLs should be visited or not.

The Robots.txt is basically structured as follows:

User-agent:*
Disallow:
Content can appear in the search results despite being excluded in south korea mobile numbers list the robots.txt. Very often, an SEO manager receives feedback that the URL is blocked via robots.txt and therefore cannot be included in the index. But this is exactly what can and will often happen, because the instruction in the robots.txt only prohibits a crawler from crawling this content. External references still give search engines a hint about the URL and they can index it. In order to prevent a URL from being indexed, a noindex should be passed to the search engine.

Noindex
To return to the crux of the matter with Robots.txt - if a URL is not allowed to be crawled by Robots.txt, a search engine cannot of course know that a noindex statement is hidden there. Therefore, we should always make sure that we tell a search engine or its crawlers etc. which content we want to index and which we do not want to index. We must therefore ensure that URLs that are set to noindex are not simultaneously excluded from crawling via Robots.txt.

Digression: The noindex meta tag is an HTML tag used to instruct search engines not to index a particular web page or web page elements and thus not to display them in search results. Using the noindex tag can help improve the visibility and relevance of a web page in search engine results by excluding irrelevant or outdated content.

canonical tag
Search engines like Google now mostly only view the canonical tag as a hint and do not always follow this information. Accordingly, it can be useful to focus on the topic of indexing control and work more intensively with noindex information and a robots.txt.

Digression: The canonical tag is an HTML tag used by search engines to identify the preferred URL of a web page when multiple URLs display the same content. When multiple URLs of the same page exist, this can lead to duplicate content , which can have a negative impact on search engine rankings. Adding a canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version to display in search results.
Post Reply