About keyword cannibalization

Will putting some links to other related articles at the bottom of a blog post cause keyword cannibalization?
I've been putting links to other articles under some of my posts recently, and I've always found that my target keyword rankings change frequently.

keyword cannibalization means having 2 different articles targeting the same keyword. You're basically creating 2 different URLs fighting for the same keyword to rank in google and google doesn't know which one of the 2 URLs to rank, so it ranks neither.

What you're asking - based on your wording - is whether or not internal linking is bad, and it's not! You can safely put links to related posts at the end of your content

I've had this issue with "keyword in country x", so I had Spain ranking for India, etc (obviously, ranking very bad).
For now, I removed it but need to figure the way as I see so many websites doing it with no problem.

But besides that, no, I don't have a problem and always interlink articles from different parts.

Changing keywords ranking for many reasons. Nowadays Google frequently rolling out updates.
And ranking dancing in SERP is a common issue. I don't believe putting related articles links at the bottom is the reason for ranking changes.

Some of the important possible reasons:
- Google updates
- New articles published on-site, and ranking pages are far behind of home page link juice
- Structure changes on sites like navigations
- Backlinks dropped of root domain or subpages
- Increasing number of bounce rate
- Number of competitors raised and doing better than you
- etc.

If a keyword is apart of another on 2 different pages, for example wedding dresses new york and then another page is targeting just wedding dresses - does this create cannibalization?

One reason why you might see undesirable results with links to articles at the end of a post is if those links are not topically related to the post itself. Like if you have a post about laptops and throw in links to articles about finance, it sends a confusing message to google about what the page is about. If it's a post about laptops, you want links in the post or after the post to be related to laptops or other tech topics.

robin222 said:

Will putting some links to other related articles at the bottom of a blog post cause keyword cannibalization?
I've been putting links to other articles under some of my posts recently, and I've always found that my target keyword rankings change frequently.

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internal linking will no do any harm to your site, what you are describing is that "linking" not keyword cannibalization so dont worry about that just make sure that you are not creating a bunch of blogs, posts or service pages targetting the same keyword (thats keyword cannibalization) or having way too many keywords in the same page (keyword stuffing) internal linking is always good and if you are new to that I will recommend you to use LinkWhisper thats a wordpress plugging