How to Find Cannibalization in 5 Minutes

Cannibalization is one of those problems that sounds made up until you realize it's been slowly destroying your rankings for months, and it happens when multiple pages on your site compete for the same keyword, sending mixed signals to Google about which page should rank, with the result being that neither page performs as well as a single consolidated page would because you're essentially dividing your own forces and conquering no one. Most people don't know they have this problem because it's invisible until you look for it, but here's how to find it in about five minutes using nothing but Search Console.

The Search Console Method

The process is almost embarrassingly simple once you know what to look for: go to Search Console, navigate to Performance and then Search results, click on a query you actually care about, one you're actively trying to rank for, and then click the "Pages" tab to see which URLs are getting impressions for that query, because if you see multiple URLs from your own site competing for the same query, you have cannibalization and your pages are fighting each other instead of fighting your competitors.

What Bad Looks Like

Let's say you check the query "how to make cold brew coffee" and you find that /blog/cold-brew-guide has 500 impressions at position 12, while /recipes/cold-brew-coffee has 300 impressions at position 18, and /tips/best-cold-brew has another 200 impressions languishing at position 25, and what you're looking at is three pages that are all trying to rank for the same thing, each one diluting the signals of the others, with none of them ranking well because the authority that could have pushed a single page to position 5 is instead split across three mediocre performers.

What Good Looks Like

By contrast, what you want to see when you check that same query is a single URL, something like /guides/cold-brew-coffee with 5,000 impressions at position 3, because this is what concentrated authority looks like: one page, one focus, clear ranking, all signals pointing in the same direction.

The Quick Audit Process

To audit your whole site systematically rather than just checking individual queries, start by exporting your Search Console data from the Queries report, then go through your top 50 queries by impressions and check how many different URLs appear for each one, flagging any query where two or more URLs are getting significant impressions because those are your cannibalization candidates, and this entire process takes about five minutes and will reveal problems you genuinely had no idea existed.

How to Fix Cannibalization

Once you've identified cannibalization, you have three options depending on your specific situation: you can consolidate by merging the competing pages into one definitive authoritative page and redirecting all the others to it, which is usually the best approach and the one I recommend by default; or you can differentiate if the pages actually serve genuinely different intents, in which case you optimize each one for different keywords and make them clearly distinct from each other so they're no longer competing; or finally you can canonicalize by pointing the weaker pages to the strongest one with canonical tags, which is the approach to use when you can't redirect for some reason, like when you're dealing with e-commerce product variants that need to remain as separate pages.

Preventing Future Cannibalization

The best cure is prevention, and before you create any new piece of content you should always search your own site using the operator site:yoursite.com "target keyword" to see what already exists, because if something relevant already exists then you should improve that existing page rather than creating something new that will inevitably compete with it, since content consolidation beats content proliferation every single time and this principle connects directly to why you should avoid index bloat in the first place.