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This is a very common issue – especially where domains have publishers with a half knolwedge of SEO. Like they know how important it is to target searches using the document name (which includes the slug) but dont know they’re creating duplicate content that Google cannot detect.
Cannabalized content is essentially duplicate content. Another way to describe it is: duplicative entry – two or more pages in the same index with roughly the same relevance score
It becomes duplicative because of BERT or semantics. The part of the indexing algorithm that catches duplicate pages (based on the document name) – the one that throws “Duplicate page; different canonical chose” – does not work on semantic synonyms….
Matt Cutts explains in the “How does Google handle duplicate content” video very well: he syas the two selective parts of the SERP builder post-index retrieval effectively pick 2 pages that then block each other.
But a few things – its much wider than your observation – so for others looking for it:
>Page position volatility: page bouncing between positions 20 and 80
Canalization happens at any position – obviously its most detrimental to top 3 places
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If you take two suspected competing pagesThere can be as many as 12 pages
Adjective phrases
things like “best” and “top” in the slug do not differentiate because they are not part of the index name/catchment.
Diagnosis can be made harder because pages only rank intermittently.
On high volume sites, privacy withholding exaggerates mis-diagnosis
# Remediation Advice
>Set the losing pages to draft or delete them
>Set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the winner
Actually – you can just do a manual removal or noindex of both to immediately remediate the situation and then republish under a new document name that doesnt cause duplicate entry.
