When you’re writing blog posts about a topic, you will have a lot of overlap and related content. “Best practice,” at least at the time of this writing, is that your website is about one overall topic, split into a few major categories pertaining to the topic, which are each then split out into more detailed articles about sub-topics.
It’s a pyramid.
But kind of a “golden rule” of SEO right now is that each URL on your blog – while it should be relevant to the overall topic – should have a very specific focus keyword/keyphrase.
Easy example: Blog about Carpentry; Categories about Techniques, Tools, Materials, and Shop (aka workspace). In the category of tools, you might have a sub-topic of hammers. Within the sub-topic of hammers, you may have additional sub-topics of what type of hammer to use for each job, what materials are best for each type of hammer, buying guide for hammers, etc. Inside the sub-sub-topic of Types of Hammers, you may have a post about each type: Ball Peen Hammers, Claw Hammers, Framing Hammers, and Sledge Hammers.
That’s getting pretty granular and might be overstating to the point of being ridiculous, but let’s just say that it wouldn’t be a stretch on a carpentry blog to have a post about The Best Claw Hammers You Can Buy.
And this blog post would probably be an affiliate post with links to Home Depot, Sears, Amazon, Walmart, etc. Hopefully, it targets keywords and phrases like “What is the best claw hammer” and “what is the best brand claw hammer” and “what claw hammer should I buy” and possibly even “do I need a claw hammer.”
Once that post is written, you might update it every year with a slightly modified title like, “Best Claw Hammers 2025.”
What you wouldn’t do is write another roundup post reviewing more claw hammers. That would likely cannibalize on your results from the first post.
Lots and lots of bloggers have already done this by the time they know anything about SEO, and it isn’t impossible to fix. How to fix it is a subject for another day, I guess.
What you could do is have a separate post for each different brand of claw hammer, and each would link back to your roundup.
Or you could write a related, but different, post called The Best Ball Peen Hammers You Can Buy and update it next year to Best Ball Peen Hammers 2025. That wouldn’t be cannibalization. Instead, conventional SEO wisdom says that would only strengthen the authority of both posts and lift both of them up slightly.
You should also link back and forth between them, with keyword optimized anchor text.
Again, this is conventional SEO at the time I’m writing this, and search engines have been tinkering with their algorithms lately so anything could change; anything is possible. But that’s something you need to know about each URL targeting a specific keyword or phrase. Don’t write two, three, ten posts on the same sub-sub-sub-topic. Write two, three, ten posts that are all related to each other, but with each one having a specific target keyword or phrase.
Best Claw Hammer and Best Ball Peen Hammer are related. Best Claw Hammer 2025 and Best Claw Hammer: Craftsman vs Milwaukee are cannibalistic.