What is keyword cannibalization?  Keyword cannibalization is an issue that is often found on websites and many webmasters may not even know that it is a concern on their own site.  This occurs when a keyword is targeted across multiple pages on a website.  This targeting, or lack of targeting, can happen in a few different ways.  Generally, it’s caused by the site’s content management system automatically assigning identical titles to the pages of the site.  It can also be caused by the intentional optimization of several pages for one keyword in hopes to strengthen the site’s relevance for that keyword.  This unfortunately causes more harm than good.

When multiple pages are targeting the same keyword, the pages of your site are essentially competing with each other to position for that phrase in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because the search engines have one common goal - to serve up the most relevant results. When the search engine spiders detect that multiple pages on the same website are all pertinent to one keyword, they are unable to determine which page of the site to list in the results because they don’t know which one is truly most relevant.  Opposite to what many people believe, when all of the pages of your site are targeting the same phrase, the search engines will not interpret this to mean that the entire site is more relevant than another for that keyword phrase. As the search engines typically do not show more than one page from each website in the SERPs, they will instead choose one page to display in the results, filtering out the others. 

There are a few downsides to keyword cannibalization.  The first is that the page chosen by the search engines may not be the page that you want to appear in the results.  Secondly, targeting unique keywords to all of the pages can help with the overall organization of the website.  The top level pages should be targeted to broader keywords (such as category levels) and the more specific pages should be targeted to more specific keywords (such as particular products). The third and probably most significant issue is that when all of the pages are targeted to the same keyword, you are passing up the opportunity to position for other keywords.  In the end, are all of your pages really about the same thing? It is more beneficial to focus on a variety of keywords that could bring qualified traffic to your website instead of putting all of your eggs into one basket.

Below are some basic search engine optimization (SEO) tips to follow to avoid keyword cannibalization:

- Consider SEO from the beginning. It’s much easier to focus on targeting each page of your site for a unique keyword when the architecture of your website is organized with SEO in mind.
- Make sure that each page is targeting a phrase that most accurately reflects the theme of the page and use that keyword throughout the meta data.
- If you’re stumped and can’t think of any other phrases that are relevant to your website, you can always use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool for ideas.

There has been a lot of buzz lately on the topic of personalized search and the death of SEO. In a widely viewed interview at PubCon 2008, Bruce Clay discussed the implications of personalized search for search engine rankings by announcing that “ranking is dead”and urging webmasters to focus less on whether or not they have a number one ranking and more on questions like:

- Did I get the conversion I was after?
- Did I really deliver on the promise of SEO?

He is not alone in this view. Andrew Wetzler, President of Morevisibility, in a recent issue of Revenue Magazine also takes up the call for webmasters to focus on optimizing sites for conversion.

Personalized search results definitely affect the importance of ranking as a metric for search engine optimization and from one point of view, they can be considered dead as a reliable metric. After all if everyone gets a different result, ranking number one for a keyword becomes virtually meaningless. However, that doesn’t mean that the content of a website cannot influence its rankings overall.

By focusing on making the pages more relevant to the user, not only can you improve conversion rates, but it could actually lead to better rankings, even in a personalized search world. If a page is well-optimized for a particular search term and users like it, it should rank well in search engine results pages for any user that is truly looking for that product or service, even if your page is not the first one that the user finds and clicks on. By choosing pages that are similarly relevant to yours, all pages that also meet those relevancy standards are boosted in the results. Focusing the optimization of your pages for what your users want is optimizing for rankings in personalized search.

Where the idea of ranking becomes truly obsolete is with the old Black Hat practices of trying to trick search engines into giving a page a high ranking for an irrelevant search term just to get lots of hits to the site. For those of us who have been working on fine tuning our page keyword targeting and content to attract the customers that are looking for us and getting them to convert as customers, personalized search may actually make very little difference. For example, we have noted that unless you are constantly clicking on the same website for a particular search, the rankings that appear based on your search activity in Google are not all that different from what would normally appear, although over time, the sites displayed tend to focus on a particular theme to a greater extent.

The average user who clicks on the same site every time is probably just looking for that website in particular, is using search to find it and is essentially just the same as a direct traffic source. Any searcher who is really and truly searching should get roughly the same results as any other user with only minor differences in ranking. In fact, this could even be a boon for some sites where their results are mingled in with other interpretations of the keyword. After all, a search for apples could be fruit or computers. If all the results are personalized for fruit, then a site that might not have appeared on the first page in regular results pages could actually be more prominent in personalized search.

Google’s tracking of user search habits has prompted new speculation about how they may be changing their ranking factors. Some have suggested that they will be taking bounce rate into account – effectively they could be tracking searcher behavior to see if users “bounce” off a link instead of continuing on to explore the site. While this is a compelling notion, the implementation of this would be fraught with difficulties for search engines as David Harry points out in his exhaustive post on the issues surrounding the question of bounce rate as a factor.  While Google would love to be able to find a metric that is less prone to spam than inbound links, bounce rate would be even easier for spammers to manipulate and is unlikely to ever become a serious factor without some kind of measures put into place to control the spamming.

That said, Google can’t help but be tempted by all of the new social network activity. After all, the basic idea behind linking as a measure of site importance was based on popularity – we often refer to those links as a vote of popularity for your site. Compared to linking, social media is a virtual cornucopia of popularity indices. This isn’t all speculation. Google has been reaching out to social media developers with their Open Social API program. This week, their Adwords group sponsored a webinar introducing their marketing partners to social media. It will be interesting to see how these new opportunities affect search engine results and the internet marketing industry in general.

As we have said before, getting visitors to your site requires promotion and keeping them there requires good quality, relevant content that will engage them and maybe even convince them to convert to become a customer. Search engine optimization, in the sense that you are trying to trick a search engine may well be on the way out, but the art of creating good web content and promoting it in a productive way is coming of age. Social media networking and interactive marketing tactics provide creative ways for websites to be found and come to prominence in the new web environment. In the old sense of the acronym, SEO is dead, but in the new world of interactive internet marketing, we’re just getting started.

Back in March, AOL decided to jump on the social media band-wagon and buy a popular social media website, Bebo.com. According to the Bebo website, they are,
“… a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment.” For AOL, this is a significant purchase and one wonders whether it will pay off and propel AOL into social media heaven. Bebo, in terms of unique visitors to the site in the U.S., ranks far behind competitors MySpace and Facebook. Even in the U.K. where Bebo was the most successful, popularity has been lagging recently which has caused some higher-ups at AOL to get a little concerned.

One huge advantage AOL will have with Bebo is that Bebo already has a popular instant messaging platform. If integrated with AOL’s instant-messaging, the AOL/Bebo partnership would rival the presence of both MySpace and Facebook as they could potentially reach over 100 million unique visitors. This would make it one of the most powerful social networking platforms ever conceived and would make AOL one of the major players in the battle for social media supremacy.

One problem AOL could face with their expansion of their social media presence is with the advertising. The advertising industry is still not fully convinced that social media sites are the way to go and have been very reluctant thus far with their ad spending on sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. One thing is for sure, however, that over time, the mainstream popularity of social media is on an upward trajectory and advertisers would be missing out in a big way if they didn’t pump up the spending.