THE RUBRIC
Site content health & cannibalization
Whether your own pages are competing with each other.
Checks 14 11% of 129
Weight 10% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
The category that is invisible from inside a CMS, because every post looks fine on its own. It only exists at the level of the corpus.
What this category covers
- Intent overlap between pages
- Near-duplicate titles across the site
- Coverage gaps against your own keyword set
- Stale pages with decaying performance
- Internal link distribution across competing pages
- Orphaned commercial pages
Representative checks
A sample of what sits in this category, with how each one is decided and who is allowed to fix it. The full list of 129 lives in the product.
| Check | Method | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Intent overlap between pages Four posts targeting one query split the signal and none of them ranks. | Graph | Assist |
| Near-duplicate titles Convergent titles are usually a symptom of convergent content. | Graph | Assist |
| Coverage gaps against your own keyword set What you claim to be about, versus what you have actually written. | Graph | Human |
| Stale pages with decaying performance Depends on a third-party data source; unavailable upstream means unmeasured, not pass. | API | Human |
What usually goes wrong
- Four posts targeting one intent, splitting the signal so none of them ranks
- A tangential blog post outranking the commercial page it was meant to support
- Titles converging on the same shape without anyone deciding they should
- Internal links scattered across near-duplicates instead of pointing at one winner
When these checks return unmeasured
A check in this category that cannot run is reported as unmeasured and counted in the denominator. It is never rounded up to a pass, which is the difference between a score that bounds its own claim and one that implies it examined everything.
- The crawl covered too small a slice of the site for corpus-level comparison to mean anything
- A third-party performance source needed for decay detection was unavailable
Where to start
- Check your top twenty queries in Search Console for more than one URL earning impressions.
- Pick the page that should own each intent, then merge or re-angle the rest.
- Repoint the internal links at the winner.