Two of your articles competing for one search

A Cannibalisation card means two or more of the articles CitedSEO wrote show up for the same search and share the times Google shows it between them, a reason to give each its own focus. When you approve it, CitedSEO keeps the page Google already prefers as the main page, refocuses the others on searches of their own, and links them to it. Every page stays live at its address: nothing is redirected, deleted or hidden.

What CitedSEO looks at

It reads your Search Console numbers for the last 28 finished days and the searches it has grouped together, where Google answers each group with one page. A card is raised when two or more of its articles split a search of one group:

• Each article was seen at least 10 times for the search.
• Each one after the first has at least a fifth of your pages' times seen for it. Less is Google trying a page now and then.
• The best of them is below 3rd. Two of your pages in the top three take more of page one between them, so that's left alone.

Searches for your brand or your site's name are left out, since your pages showing together there is expected. So is an article whose current version went live inside the 28 days, since Google is still trying it against the old one. Pages CitedSEO didn't write are never counted.

You get one card per group of searches. It waits until you connect Search Console and your first article is live.

What the card shows

• The search, and a bar of how its clicks split between your pages, or how often each is seen while neither gets a click.
• Each page with its place and clicks. The page that leads comes first, marked Main page: the one Google already sends the most clicks for the group's searches.
• What we'll change: which page stays the main one, what the others are refocused on, and the link to the main page.
• Estimated gain: extra clicks a month if one page holds the search alone and climbs, less the clicks your pages get for it now. It's an estimate, not a promise.

What CitedSEO does when you approve it

The main page keeps the searches, and takes in anything only the other page says. Each other page is refocused on searches of its own, the ones it was written for or an angle of its own, and links to the main page. Each article's update is checked like any other change, and either every update on the card goes live or none does.

Page updates in Autopilot lets these cards ship without waiting for your OK. Once they're live, you can undo them from Opportunities › Shipped.

What it never does

• It never redirects, deletes, merges away, unpublishes or hides a page from Google. A plan that says so is refused before you see it.
• It never changes a page CitedSEO didn't write.

Related

• How the opportunity queue works
• Approve, skip or hold a change
• Internal links
• Undo something that went live