nexaex.in · Marketing
Our own site: a content platform at a few hundred pages, the keyword cannibalisation that came with it, and the consolidation pattern we now use to fix it.
01 — The problem
Publishing at volume is easy. Publishing at volume without producing several pages that compete for the same query is not.
Past a couple of hundred posts, the failure mode is invisible from inside: nothing looks broken, but Google has to choose between three of your own pages and ends up ranking none of them well.
Answer engines make it worse. They cite one authoritative page, so a topic split three ways gets cited zero times.
02 — Decisions
Every one of these had a cheaper option we deliberately didn't take.
A merged topic keeps the accumulated age and links of the best slug. Creating a fresh URL and redirecting everything into it throws that away and needs more redirects.
The trade-off. Less satisfying than a new post with a new date, and it makes the content calendar look emptier.
Deploying the 301 before removing the old page means there is never a window where the URL returns a 404. We verify the redirect in production before touching the post's published flag.
The trade-off. Two steps and a deploy between them, rather than one database update.
Article, breadcrumb and FAQ schema on each guide is what lets an answer engine lift a specific Q&A. The FAQ block is the part that actually gets quoted.
The trade-off. Every post now carries an editorial obligation to write six to eight genuinely distinct questions, which is slower than writing prose.
03 — What shipped
Stack
04 — What we’d do differently
We should have run a duplicate check before writing each post rather than after a few hundred had accumulated. Cleaning up cannibalisation costs far more than avoiding it, and we are still working through the backlog.
One conversation to scope the work, meet the team, and get a proposal — usually within two business days.