Last reviewed: February 2026
Content Cannibalization: When Law Firm Pages Clash
Your personal injury practice area page ranks on page two. Your blog post titled “What Is Personal Injury Law?” also ranks on page two, for the same keyword. Neither page reaches page one. You have been competing against yourself, and both pages are losing.
Content cannibalization happens when multiple pages on the same site target the same keyword and search intent, forcing Google to choose between them. Instead of concentrating ranking signals on one strong page, those signals get split across two or more weaker pages. For law firms, this is one of the most common and least diagnosed SEO problems, because the site architecture that creates it feels logical from the firm’s perspective even when it is destructive from Google’s perspective.
Where Cannibalization Starts on Law Firm Sites
Two patterns cause most cannibalization on legal websites. The first is blog-versus-practice-area overlap. The second is location page collision.
The blog overlap pattern works like this. A firm publishes a practice area page targeting “divorce lawyer Dallas.” Six months later, a content writer publishes a blog post titled “Everything You Need to Know About Divorce in Dallas.” Both pages target the same primary keyword. Both pages serve the same informational-to-transactional intent. Google now has to decide which one to show, and it often gets this wrong, surfacing the blog post (which has no CTA or conversion path) instead of the practice area page (which does).
This is not a hypothetical problem. As the Seologist analysis published in December 2025 describes, a Toronto law firm targeting “personal injury lawyer” found its authority split across multiple thin blog posts instead of flowing to the main service page. The fix required consolidating content and redirecting the weaker pages to concentrate signals on the primary target.
The location page pattern is subtler. Say a firm has offices in Houston and The Woodlands. Both location pages target “criminal defense attorney” with their respective city names. But for searchers in the overlap zone between the two cities, Google may see both pages as relevant and alternate between them, never committing to ranking either one consistently. When location-specific practice area pages start multiplying across multiple offices and multiple practice areas, the potential for collision grows exponentially.
Diagnosing the Problem in Search Console
Suspecting cannibalization and confirming it require different approaches. The diagnostic tool that matters most is Google Search Console’s Performance report, because it shows you exactly which URLs Google is choosing to rank for each query.
The process: go to Performance, click on a query you are targeting, then click the Pages tab. If you see two or more URLs receiving impressions for the same query, you have a potential cannibalization issue. The key word is “potential” because not every multi-URL appearance is harmful.
The signal that confirms harmful cannibalization is position instability. If the two URLs alternate in ranking position over weeks, with one appearing in position 12 one week and position 18 the next while the other URL mirrors the opposite pattern, Google is oscillating between them. That oscillation means Google cannot determine which page is the better answer, and the result is that neither page ranks as well as a single, consolidated page would.
Another diagnostic signal: look at click-through rate per URL. If one URL gets impressions but almost no clicks while the other gets both impressions and clicks, the low-click URL is likely hurting the high-click URL’s performance by diluting its impression share. This becomes clearer when you compare periods. Did the practice area page rank better before the blog post was published? If yes, the blog post likely introduced the cannibalization.
What Search Console shows that third-party tools often miss is the specific URL Google selects for each query on each day. Ahrefs and Semrush can tell you that two pages rank for the same keyword, but Search Console tells you how Google is actually distributing impressions between them, which is the data point that matters for diagnosing intent-level cannibalization.
Do this now: open Search Console, go to Performance, and click on your highest-priority practice area keyword. Click the Pages tab. If more than one URL appears with impressions for that query, check whether positions fluctuate between the URLs week over week. If they do, you have active cannibalization costing you rankings right now — and the fix (covered below) will likely produce a ranking improvement within weeks.
Local Queries Tolerate More Overlap Than National Ones
Wait — before you audit everything, a caveat. Local legal queries are somewhat more forgiving of page overlap because Google’s local intent detection adds a geographic filter that helps it choose between pages.
When someone searches “personal injury lawyer near me,” Google uses their location to determine which of your pages is most geographically relevant. If you have a Houston page and a Dallas page, Google will usually surface the correct one based on the searcher’s proximity. This means location-page overlap across genuinely different service areas is often not cannibalization in the harmful sense.
National or non-localized queries are more sensitive. “What is comparative negligence?” does not have a geographic filter. If your site has a practice area page explaining comparative negligence and a blog post explaining comparative negligence, Google has no tiebreaker. Both pages match the same intent, neither has a geographic advantage, and the result is the classic split-signal problem.
Audit your site for cannibalization by query type, not just by keyword. A keyword appearing on two pages is not automatically a problem. Two pages competing for the same query with the same intent and no geographic differentiator is the problem.
Consolidate, Redirect, or Differentiate
Once you have confirmed cannibalization, you have three resolution options. The right one depends on the specifics.
Consolidate when both pages have valuable content but neither is strong enough alone. Take the best sections from each page, merge them into a single comprehensive page, and 301 redirect (a permanent forwarding instruction that tells Google and browsers the page has moved) the URL you are retiring to the surviving URL. This is the right approach when a blog post and a practice area page both contain useful information but overlap in keyword targeting. The practice area page usually survives because it is the page you want converting visitors.
Redirect when one page is clearly weaker and adds nothing the other does not already cover. If the blog post is a thin overview of a topic the practice area page handles in depth, the blog post does not need to be merged. It needs to be redirected. The 301 redirect passes whatever link equity the retiring page accumulated to the surviving page, which often produces an immediate ranking improvement for the surviving URL.
Differentiate when both pages have a legitimate reason to exist but need clearer intent separation. Say you have a practice area page targeting “car accident lawyer Houston” and a blog post about “what to do after a car accident in Houston.” These could serve different intents, one transactional and one informational, but if the blog post drifts into “hire a lawyer” territory, the intent overlap creates cannibalization. The fix is to sharpen the blog post’s focus purely on informational content (steps to take at the scene, when to see a doctor, how to file an insurance claim) and remove any language that overlaps with the practice area page’s conversion intent. Then ensure the blog post links to the practice area page, creating a clear hierarchy rather than a competition.
The criteria for choosing: if one page has significantly more backlinks or established rankings, that page survives. If both pages have comparable authority, the page with the conversion path survives. If neither page has meaningful authority, consolidation into a fresh, comprehensive page is often better than preserving either weak original.
Preventing Cannibalization Before It Starts
The fix for cannibalization is reactive. Prevention is a workflow problem, and solving it requires a document that most law firm marketing teams do not maintain: a keyword-to-URL map.
A keyword-to-URL map is a simple spreadsheet. One column lists every target keyword. The next column lists the single URL assigned to that keyword. The third column notes the intent (informational, transactional, local). Before any new content is written, the writer checks the map. If the target keyword already has an assigned URL, the new content either targets a different keyword or is written as a supporting piece that links to (rather than competes with) the assigned URL.
This map feeds directly off the keyword research process we detail in the first post of this series. When keywords are initially researched and organized, each keyword should be mapped to a page type: practice area page, blog post, FAQ, or location page. That mapping is the first line of defense against cannibalization, because it forces the decision about which page owns which keyword before content is created rather than after two pages are already competing.
The map needs maintenance. As new content is added, the map gets updated. When a blog post is published, its target keyword gets logged. When a new practice area subpage goes live, its keywords get logged. Quarterly audits of the map against Search Console data catch any drift: cases where a page is ranking for keywords assigned to a different URL.
For firms publishing multiple blog posts per month, this maintenance is not optional. The more content your site has, the higher the probability that a new post will accidentally target a keyword already owned by an existing page. Firms that publish aggressively without a mapping system almost always develop cannibalization problems within 12 to 18 months, and by that point, untangling the overlap requires a full content audit rather than a simple redirect.
The cost of ignoring cannibalization is not abstract. Pages competing for the same keyword typically rank one to two positions lower than a single consolidated page would. The CTR difference between position 3 and position 5 is roughly 40%, based on Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million Google search results. If your practice area page should be at position 3 but cannibalization holds it at position 5, you are losing nearly half the clicks that keyword could generate. For a keyword that drives ten leads per month at position 3, cannibalization is costing you four leads per month — leads that go to a competitor who does not have two pages fighting each other.
How to know consolidation worked: after merging or redirecting cannibalized pages, monitor the surviving page in Search Console. The expected pattern is a temporary dip in impressions (as Google processes the change), followed by a stabilization period of two to four weeks, then a gradual position improvement over four to eight weeks as Google recognizes the consolidated page as the definitive resource. If the surviving page does not show position improvement within eight weeks, check whether the redirect is working correctly, whether the merged content is actually stronger than what it replaced, and whether internal links have been updated to point to the surviving URL.
Cannibalization also works against your topical authority. When Google sees two pages from your site competing for the same term, it cannot determine which one represents your authoritative take. This undermines the cluster-based authority that compounds over time — our topical authority post explains how that compounding mechanism works and why a clean keyword map is prerequisite infrastructure.
Cannibalization auditing belongs in the first 30 days. The keyword-to-URL map takes an hour to set up and five minutes per piece to maintain. The content audit required to fix a year’s worth of cannibalization takes weeks. The prevention is worth the effort.