Content cannibalisation is when multiple pages on a website compete for the same or similar keywords and search intent.
Content cannibalisation is when “multiple pages on a website compete for the same or similar keywords and search intent.” This can happen if they’re effectively targeting the same keyword, covering similar topics or just have very similar content. In many cases, there’s not much we can do about it, but SEO experts claim to get some decent improvements where it is possible to remove it.
The effects of content cannibalisation in the search engines include two or more pages alternating in the results for the same keywords; pages losing ranking after another one goes live; Google not indexing new pages; and reports of ‘crawled, not indexed’ in Google Search Console.
There are some highly complex techniques for identifying this issue, but in my experience, it’s a good first step simply to look out for the effects listed above, and to try to determine where the overlap is.