Avoiding key word cannibalism

Im trying to work out a solution to a problem I have had in the past with my other websites.

I have a couple of websites but never focused on seo properly, just gaining most of my traffic from social platforms. I also used popups and content lockers which isn't very user friendly so I thought google wouldnt rank it at all, some of the websites still get 100s - 1000s of clicks per month, some dont get any more impressions at all but 100s of pages are still indexed. I did a lot wrong with these websites looking back.

I will do my best to explain the problems using a different niche

I want to create multiple posts with my main Keyword being "Apex Legends Hack" instead of creating one post that includes all the apex legends cheats. All the top ranking pages don't do this, on the second page most of them do.
I want to do this so that if people search on my website they will find my latest post about apex legends and it will most likely be working and not patched.
Will creating posts eg "Apex Legends Hack | Aimbot ESP" and "Apex Legends Hack | Spinbot Auto Shield Swap" be enough to avoid this? Im thinking it won't...

My headers usually look like something like this
h1 Apex Legends Hack | Spinbot Auto Shield Swap
h2 What is a hack for Apex Legends
h3 How to install the Apex legends hack

Should I 301 old posts to new ones? Usually, my posts rank in the top 3 pages early on, will they still show up in ranking or somehow combine with the post it is 301 redirected to? I dont really understand sorry

Some of my competitors I see ranking in my niche are ranking off tags, im thinking this is probably my best option, does that mean i should be putting no index on my posts then?

Some of them have their urls looking like website.com/apex-legends-hackdjsadsaj

My oldest website has many duplicate posts like this and it doesn't rank anymore sadly, I believe this is one of the many many reasons and I do not want to do it again.





my niche isnt game hacking but the concept of how stuff gets patched/stops working is similar.

as a rule of thumb of SEO, if something works you don't change / improve it. Namely, if some of your posts are ranking (and you DO want that content to continue ranking) you don't touch it. You can change any other page of your site that you want, just don't touch the content that's already ranking... or its URL structure for that matter...

And if something doesn't work, then that's where you make the changes, whether it's improving / adding content, 301-ing or changing the URL structure, or whatever's needed...

This is the rule of thumb. Now, with regards to your questions...

GeraldHK said:

I want to create multiple posts with my main Keyword being "Apex Legends Hack" instead of creating one post that includes all the apex legends cheats. All the top ranking pages don't do this, on the second page most of them do.

Click to expand...

if the pages ranking on page 1 don't do this and rank, while the pages ranking on page 2 do it but they don't rank... well... it's pretty obvious that you shouldn't use this approach

GeraldHK said:

I want to do this so that if people search on my website they will find my latest post about apex legends and it will most likely be working and not patched.

Click to expand...

I don't think you should complicate yourself with multiple pages which, by the looks of it, are very thin content in nature and they're also 90% duplicate content, as well.

You can put all hacks on one page, and whenever there's a new hack you just add it at the top of the page, and then update the title of the page to read "Apex Legends Hack - UPDATED 03/31/2023" (or whatever the date of the updating is.)

And since google loves fresh and updated content they will probably crawl and rank this page high anyway, so it makes all of the sense in the world to put all hacks on the same page

GeraldHK said:

Should I 301 old posts to new ones? Usually, my posts rank in the top 3 pages early on, will they still show up in ranking or somehow combine with the post it is 301 redirected to

Click to expand...

I don't think I understand what you're trying to say / do here. Can you, perhaps, rephrase?

GeraldHK said:

Some of my competitors I see ranking in my niche are ranking off tags, im thinking this is probably my best option, does that mean i should be putting no index on my posts then?

Click to expand...

What does the highlighted text mean? That the tag pages are ranking instead of the content pages, or what? And no, you should never noindex your posts (if you want them to show up in google, that is...)

GeraldHK said:

Some of them have their urls looking like website.com/apex-legends-hackdjsadsaj

Click to expand...

URL structure doesn't matter, your URLs can be ugly as fuck and still rank without any problem, so you shouldn't be concerned with what the URLs look like, although you would still want them to look pretty, just for the sake of looking like you care about your site if for no other reason

tazarbm said:

I don't think you should complicate yourself with multiple pages which, by the looks of it, are very thin content in nature and they're also 90% duplicate content, as well.

Click to expand...

Yea a lot of the content ranking first consists of a title around 50 words describing what it is and an image

tazarbm said:

You can put all hacks on one page, and whenever there's a new hack you just add it at the top of the page, and then update the title of the page to read "Apex Legends Hack - UPDATED 03/31/2023" (or whatever the date of the updating is.)

And since google loves fresh and updated content they will probably crawl and rank this page high anyway, so it makes all of the sense in the world to put all hacks on the same page

Click to expand...

Thank you, I was thinking of doing this so its good to see that google will be happy that im adding freshing content to these pages

tazarbm said:

What does the highlighted text mean? That the tag pages are ranking instead of the content pages, or what? And no, you should never noindex your posts (if you want them to show up in google, that is...)

Click to expand...

Yes tag pages seem to rank well for me and others. These pages just display all the posts that are tagged with "apex legends hack". A lot of my tag pages are ranking for longer keywords, i havent had any ranking for just "game name + hack" usually just "game name + hack + aimbot esp". But my website is still new and in the past the seo plugins automatically noindexed all my tag pages so they never got a chance.



Thank you for your answers they are very helpful, i am also glad to hear that the url structure isnt as important as i thought it was

Have you tried using a category-based approach?

You might have to tweak your permalinks structure to go this route

blackbeans said:

Have you tried using a category-based approach?

You might have to tweak your permalinks structure to go this route

Click to expand...

I have seen other websites with this kind of design I don't see it often and it's usually on the 2nd/3rd page but maybe I can find a way to make it work well for me.

When you say change permalink structure do you mean instead of site.com/categories/apex-legends-hacks it would be better to make it looks something like this if possible? site.com/apex-legends-hacks.

I don't think I will take this approach as tags seem to be working well for me and others at the moment but I think it could work well if done properly.

GeraldHK said:

Yes tag pages seem to rank well for me and others. These pages just display all the posts that are tagged with "apex legends hack". A lot of my tag pages are ranking for longer keywords, i havent had any ranking for just "game name + hack" usually just "game name + hack + aimbot esp". But my website is still new and in the past the seo plugins automatically noindexed all my tag pages so they never got a chance.

Click to expand...

damn, I never saw this before. And I don't know what to say about it...

And yes, SEO plugins do noindex tag pages because tag pages should be noindexed (ok, maybe they shouldn't necessarily be noindexed, but they are noindexed, generally speaking, in order to avoid content duplication issues). So, nothing wrong here. But tag pages ranking before content pages, now that's something I don't see everyday. Google has totally lost it lol

I honestly don't know what to say in this case, really. Just put all of the hacks on one page and try to index and rank that page and since google's so in love with tag pages then, I don't know, maybe create a lot of tag pages and get them indexed?

tazarbm said:

as a rule of thumb of SEO, if something works you don't change / improve it. Namely, if some of your posts are ranking (and you DO want that content to continue ranking) you don't touch it. You can change any other page of your site that you want, just don't touch the content that's already ranking... or its URL structure for that matter...

And if something doesn't work, then that's where you make the changes, whether it's improving / adding content, 301-ing or changing the URL structure, or whatever's needed...

This is the rule of thumb. Now, with regards to your questions...


if the pages ranking on page 1 don't do this and rank, while the pages ranking on page 2 do it but they don't rank... well... it's pretty obvious that you shouldn't use this approach


I don't think you should complicate yourself with multiple pages which, by the looks of it, are very thin content in nature and they're also 90% duplicate content, as well.

You can put all hacks on one page, and whenever there's a new hack you just add it at the top of the page, and then update the title of the page to read "Apex Legends Hack - UPDATED 03/31/2023" (or whatever the date of the updating is.)

And since google loves fresh and updated content they will probably crawl and rank this page high anyway, so it makes all of the sense in the world to put all hacks on the same page


I don't think I understand what you're trying to say / do here. Can you, perhaps, rephrase?


What does the highlighted text mean? That the tag pages are ranking instead of the content pages, or what? And no, you should never noindex your posts (if you want them to show up in google, that is...)


URL structure doesn't matter, your URLs can be ugly as fuck and still rank without any problem, so you shouldn't be concerned with what the URLs look like, although you would still want them to look pretty, just for the sake of looking like you care about your site if for no other reason

Click to expand...

Well explaination. It also help me.

Just an update / Trying to rank with tags

Tried enabling tags for the search engine to index and using roughly the same amount my competitors are using but it just killed the website pretty fast, I have undone what I did but no changes yet....
Maybe all the pages indexed made google worried, my content is also very thin but more then most of the other people in my niche, 50 words or so altogether.


The tags were helping a lot before hand, I have them displayed on the post at the bottom and many of the search queries according to google were exactly what the tag was.

Tha

GeraldHK said:

View attachment 255311
Just an update / Trying to rank with tags

Tried enabling tags for the search engine to index and using roughly the same amount my competitors are using but it just killed the website pretty fast, I have undone what I did but no changes yet....
Maybe all the pages indexed made google worried, my content is also very thin but more then most of the other people in my niche, 50 words or so altogether.


The tags were helping a lot before hand, I have them displayed on the post at the bottom and many of the search queries according to google were exactly what the tag was.

Click to expand...

Woah, just recently had a nightmare about a graph like this. That almost looks like a manual penalty. Have you checked the respective section in GSC?

justalazyseo said:

Tha

Woah, just recently had a nightmare about a graph like this. That almost looks like a manual penalty. Have you checked the respective section in GSC?

Click to expand...

I have checked the penalty but it's empty . Not really sure what I should do with it, it still gets 1000s of traffic from yt but was exciting to see it doing well on google search console.
The site was only a month old maybe it could be worth to move it to another domain and not enable tags again.