keyword cannabalisation

[aidanfitz]

Hi

I'd like to hear the views of more people on a problem i have on our travel site. In an effort to increase our rankings on a keyphrase i.e city+hotels, my superior has created a new page on the subject even though we already have an existing page which is 14 yrs old on that topic. The old page enjoys healthy rankings for variations of the phrase we are optimising for but not the main very competitive one.

I believe by creating more than one page, we are spamming and competing with ourselves for that particular phrase. What worries me more is that a link has now been placed on our homepage for city+hotels going to URL A , whilst underneath is another of the same keyword link directed to URL B. Surely there is an issue with link splitting also, where we are breaking the linking potential in two. I would appreciate your views

Thanks

[incrediblehelp]

yes you should be focusing your efforts on the long standing page.

[NateDesmond]

Putting many keywords in your writing is dangerous. If the ratio of keywords to other words on any page reaches a certain amount, Google (and probably the other search engines) will punish that page and possibly the entire domain name. The recommended keyword density is 3% to 7%. You can check your keyword density here. Just type in the URL of the page you want to check.

[caminowebmaster]

I think the question here is why is he doing that?

Also why is your old page (14yrs) not yet ranking for the main key words - that is a long time to wait....

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by NateDesmond

Putting many keywords in your writing is dangerous. If the ratio of keywords to other words on any page reaches a certain amount, Google (and probably the other search engines) will punish that page and possibly the entire domain name. The recommended keyword density is 3% to 7%. You can check your keyword density here. Just type in the URL of the page you want to check.

Keyword density is not an important factor in getting websites ranked. Maybe back in 2000 it was. Just write for your end users.

[inertia]

There is nothing wrong with him writing new content for the site, just make sure he doesnt cause any issues where the new page is competing with the old one.

If the old page is about widgets then the new page should be about blue widgets...

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by aidanfitz

Hi

I'd like to hear the views of more people on a problem i have on our travel site. In an effort to increase our rankings on a keyphrase i.e city+hotels, my superior has created a new page on the subject even though we already have an existing page which is 14 yrs old on that topic. The old page enjoys healthy rankings for variations of the phrase we are optimising for but not the main very competitive one.

I believe by creating more than one page, we are spamming and competing with ourselves for that particular phrase. What worries me more is that a link has now been placed on our homepage for city+hotels going to URL A , whilst underneath is another of the same keyword link directed to URL B. Surely there is an issue with link splitting also, where we are breaking the linking potential in two. I would appreciate your views

Thanks

So now you have 2 problems. You can't tell your superior to stop doing that but you also need higher rankings. Your best choice is to develop his simple idea so that you can make sure you don't embarres him, while at the same time obtaining the higher rankings.

You could do the following:

Look at the subject of that one page you have had for many years. Leave the content as it is, but try to find sub categories of that content. For example, you could create a whole section of pages on each city. "things to do", "landmarks", "touristical points", etc. etc. etc. Write a new page on each of these things, ie. "things to do in [city name]", "landmarks in [city name]", etc.

Now create a simple menu, like a small block at the right top of each page, in which you link to all the pages you wrote, including that old page and use the right keywords in the links. So you'll buid a small block that says:

[city name] hotels
things to do in [city name]
landmarks in [city name]

You'll create a nice block of pages + internal links with great links texts that will help you increase the number of phrases the page is found for, and it will also support rankings for that main phrase you want.

Present this idea to your superior or better, build a complete example of it for a specific city and present that. You'll show him/her that you took the idea and developed it further. You'll gain points with your superior and obtain many more visitors.

[ami_iss]

My experience (which may not be typical) is that it does not hurt to have more than one page with the same keyword and it may help, provided they both link to each other and are not duplicate content, and even if they do not link to each other. The new page may be listed beneath and indented from the old page. It may help if the new page has a variation of the keyword. EG if page A has Paris: Hotels then page b can have Hotels: Paris.

You might have a dozen pages with equivalent content and optimization and find that one really takes off, while all the others are so-so, and there is no rational explanation.

AFAIK keyword density does matter. IBP thinks it does and I have generally found that it helps. Likewise, unless the raw density (including stop words (common words that are not indexed supposedly) exceeds 10% which is absurd, higher density does not seem to hurt - it is usually essential.

Adding 1 link on 1 page is not going to do much - BUT - one way that often works to get a page to stand out from others on your Web site is to repeat the link to that page on every page of your site. Obviously, if you are doing that for both pages, one of them will suffer for that keyword.

[seosean]

I'd put my focus on the older page - but I would not worry that the new one would cause you problems unless it's duplicate content.

[hostchecker]

If its a completely new site I see no harm. Maybe go after things slightly differently on the new one