i was digging through my search console data earlier and realized i had a massive mess of pages all competing for the exact same terms. it is basically when you have multiple urls trying to rank for one specific phrase, which ends up confusing both google and the newer ai citation engines. instead of having one strong authority page, you end up with several weak ones splitting the credit. i found that the best way to handle this is by auditing your top pages to see where the overlap happens and then either
merging the content or using canonical tags to point everything to a single master post. it is much better to have one powerhouse url than to let your site
self-destruct through internal competition.
it actually felt like i was sabotaging my own traffic on purpose . does anyone else use a specific tool or a simple spreadsheet to track which pages are overlapping? i am trying to find a way to automate this check so i do not have to manually scan every single slug.
found this here:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization-guide/