I’m A Celebrity: How publishers can avoid cannibalisation

With a recurring event that produces newsworthy drama each day, such as I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here, it’s easy to fall into a conflicting content trap.

For all you need to know on cannibalisation, read our complete guide...

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Last weekend kicked off the enormously popular reality TV show ‘I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here’. In the build up to this, publishers spewed out articles revealing this year’s contestants, and now that the program is underway even more are set to be published each day!

As these articles will be similarly themed, with similar keyword focuses, publishers will need to consider content confliction and how to avoid it. Conflicting content, or cannibalisation, can result in a site completely falling out of the SERPs and losing out on traffic.

I’m A Celebrity conflict

If we look at the Daily Mail’s performance on Pi’s Position Explorer Chart, for the search term ‘I’m a celebrity’, we see a whopping 10 pages returning.

Dailymail.co.uk daily positions for term ‘I’m a celebrity’

On this chart, each letter represents a different returning URL for the search term ‘I’m a celebrity’. We can see that having so many pages optimised for this term is confusing Google, and is resulting in the Daily Mail’s inability to maintain their position in the SERPs, as different content is served each day.

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In contrast to this, Heat World’s site has only one URL returning for the same term:

Heatworld.com daily positions for the term ‘I’m a celebrity’

Heat World’s performance has stayed relatively flat over the last 10 days. Google has no trouble knowing which page to serve, so Heat World has consistent visibility.

How can publishers avoid cannibalisation?

What’s Heat World doing right? The returning URL above is being used as their main landing page, which all its jungle news links back to, via the keywords that they want to rank for.

Championing and optimising this one page helps Google understand which is the correct ‘Gateway’ into their site. Therefore Google knows what content to serve and Heat World doesn’t drop out of the SERPs.

Learn more about Keyword Cannibalisation and how to prevent it here.

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