How do you avoid keyword cannibalization on your articles?

This is becoming a problem for my blog. I am targetting a whole lot of long tailed keywords in a small topic of my niche to establish topical authority.
But the subheaders in many of those keywords overlap with each other.
Basically I need to include the same or a slight variation of a subheader for 2 keywords on different articles.

Will it be a problem?

If it's very closely related, I usually include them in the same post, under different h2/h3/h4 depending on how close the subjects are.

You can Use chatgpt to suggest you content for the same topics and then use the headers that it suggested in the generated content to make your content unique. Hope this approach helps.

roydan said:

If it's very closely related, I usually include them in the same post, under different h2/h3/h4 depending on how close the subjects are.

Click to expand...

What do you do if let's say 1 of your article has to use a keyword as a semantic subheading (because the competitor is doing it) but that keyword was the main title of another of your article?

Waifu_tatyana said:

This is becoming a problem for my blog. I am targetting a whole lot of long tailed keywords in a small topic of my niche to establish topical authority.
But the subheaders in many of those keywords overlap with each other.
Basically I need to include the same or a slight variation of a subheader for 2 keywords on different articles.

Will it be a problem?

Click to expand...

May it be a problem, but you should identify and solve this issues on the fly. Generally people started solving this issues with huge skycrapper 5-10K words content pages. But over the time this kind of pages have become obsolete and bad rankers on Google.

Nowadays it would be better to solve any cannibalization issue as soon as you spot it, most of the times by merging and 301 the worst performer (or even jus wipping the content, which is painful, but necessary at times: remember, skycrappers are no more a great idea)

Waifu_tatyana said:

This is becoming a problem for my blog. I am targetting a whole lot of long tailed keywords in a small topic of my niche to establish topical authority.
But the subheaders in many of those keywords overlap with each other.
Basically I need to include the same or a slight variation of a subheader for 2 keywords on different articles.

Will it be a problem?

Click to expand...

I would suggest creating a new post regarding your long tail keyword and breadcrumbing your small keywords between them.

Waifu_tatyana said:

What do you do if let's say 1 of your article has to use a keyword as a semantic subheading (because the competitor is doing it) but that keyword was the main title of another of your article?

Click to expand...

If it has a different context, I leave it as it is. This will most likely won't be tgat problematic.
Follow @SirLouen 's advice and treat it on the fly with 301, but only if you found an actual problem.

SirLouen said:

May it be a problem, but you should identify and solve this issues on the fly. Generally people started solving this issues with huge skycrapper 5-10K words content pages. But over the time this kind of pages have become obsolete and bad rankers on Google.

Nowadays it would be better to solve any cannibalization issue as soon as you spot it, most of the times by merging and 301 the worst performer (or even jus wipping the content, which is painful, but necessary at times: remember, skycrappers are no more a great idea)

Click to expand...

roydan said:

If it has a different context, I leave it as it is. This will most likely won't be tgat problematic.
Follow @SirLouen 's advice and treat it on the fly with 301, but only if you found an actual problem.

Click to expand...

301 redirect is a great idea. Thanks.

You can fix cannibalization issues by reworking your internal linking structure, especially when using exact match anchor text. Pick one preferred page also referred to as the primary or principal page for each affected keyword. And make this preference clear to Google so it knows which to rank highest.

Waifu_tatyana said:

This is becoming a problem for my blog. I am targetting a whole lot of long tailed keywords in a small topic of my niche to establish topical authority.
But the subheaders in many of those keywords overlap with each other.
Basically I need to include the same or a slight variation of a subheader for 2 keywords on different articles.

Will it be a problem?

Click to expand...

Having overlapping subheaders on different articles within the same website is not necessarily a problem as long as the content of each article is unique and provides value to the reader.

It is common for subheaders to be similar or even identical across different articles within the same website, particularly when the articles cover related topics within the same niche. However, it's important to ensure that each article provides unique and valuable information to the reader, rather than just rehashing the same content with slightly different keywords or subheaders.

In fact, having similar subheaders across related articles can actually be helpful for establishing topical authority and demonstrating to search engines that your website has expertise in a particular niche or topic.

That being said, it's always a good practice to review your content periodically and ensure that each article provides unique and valuable information to the reader, rather than just repeating the same information across multiple articles.

Best way is to restructure your content and group as many similar pages together as possible.
Then you can also add Canonical Tags to the cannibal page’s HTTP header, in case you want to keep both pages separate.