Search
Each search you rank for is served by one page rather than several
seo.gsc-cannibalisation
Why this matters
When several of your pages answer the same search, the things that decide ranking — links, engagement, relevance — are divided between them instead of accumulating on one. Google picks whichever it currently thinks is best and can change its mind week to week, and the result is that a search you should own is served by two or three pages, none of which does well. It is invisible from inside the site: every page looks fine on its own.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
two hours per search
Care needed
Test before and after
How to fix it
Take one search from the list and open the competing pages side by side. Decide which one you want to rank — usually the one already getting the most appearances, not the one you think is best written. Then merge: move anything worth keeping from the others into it, redirect them to it permanently, and change the internal links that pointed at them so they point at the survivor. Where the pages genuinely serve different intents and should both exist, the fix is the opposite — make them more different from each other in title, opening paragraph and the words they use, so Google can tell them apart. Do not use canonical tags to paper over it: a canonical is a hint and Google can decline it, and a page that stays reachable stays in the competition. Change one search's worth at a time and give it a fortnight before judging.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 12 points off your search score. This one is a measurement rather than a fact about your markup, so two scans of an unchanged site can legitimately differ a little.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 121. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Every page Google has indexed still loadsGoogle keeps showing a page in its results until it re-crawls and finds it gone, and that can take weeks. In the meantime every person who clicks that result lands on an error — the worst possible first impression, and one nobody inside the business ever sees, because they navigate to pages rather than searching for them.