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Yeeps ✅, but depends if you're indexing the landing page or not

Not sure if this is self promotion but just posted about something similar yesterday: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ishaan-shakunt_seo-marketing-paidmedia-activity-7056966480613052417-AARv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

My question is bit different

Question for you: If the landing page starts ranking instead of the pillar page, in which cases do you see that as an issue?

Authority building

Both pages don't rank- I haven't seen that happen. More often than not, the page that Google deems more relevant starts ranking for that keyword.

I was in the same mindset but in that case - why is there so much hype about keyword cannibalization

Often the pillar page stops ranking for certain keyword for which the landing page is more relevant but the landing page may have a higher rank than the pillar page for that keyword.

@Sagrika Jain Both pages do "rank", but none of them would make it to the top 5 in most cases

Hmm.. I've seen that which page is ranking simply gets "replaced". Then if the new page is more relevant it may even rank higher.

Ohh yep, a lot. But again the thing to be focused on would be whether you want the landing pages to be indexed or not.

Where I've seen managing this becomes useful is cases like: Let's say a product page is ranking for a keyword and then a blog outranks it. The conversion rate for the blog may be lower, so you'd want to deoptimize the blog, internally link from the blog and move the ranking back to the product page.

And of course it would also depend on the search intent, so consider a keyword that is "x alternatives". There is a listicle and landing page at the same time for the website. The search intent was listicles. We found none of them were performing better, so decided to no-index the landing page. And the ranking for the listicle improved automatically

If landing pages are very thin, and you don't put a lot of effort in it, in general I've seen that it's a good idea to noindex everything by default. Even if you don't have someone to keep an eye on things like them outranking your product pages. Apart from this, if your landing page often have as much information as your product pages, then I would say just do it. I've seen this help rank for all the keyword variations your product page missed.

Same happened with us

Nope, the competitors 😂

Haha, nice. And you still had two pages ranking for this keyword?

So now we are planning to convert all our landing pages to blogs. But it's like taking a risk ...so not sure..as a lot of time and effort ( backlinks) have been built on those landing pages

Yep Ishaan. Both of them on Top 10

That's awesome! I've not seen this specific thing happen for alternative keywords yet. Thanks for sharing this.

@Sagrika Jain If you're planning to do this, try to start with the ones that have lower search presence

A simple hack: Add a canonical tag pointing to the pillar page.

@Sagrika Jain - I don't see kw cannibalization to be a big issue here, unless you have a lot of similar pages. You can keep both targeting the same keywords. See how Moz ranks for both the links 👇