Multiple locations competing for overlapping geography produce a specific failure: search engines cannot decide which page serves which area, so the selection flips. This is an internal signalling problem rather than a content quality one, and it is fixed by making the mapping explicit.
multi-location-cannibalisation.md
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name: multi-location-cannibalisation
description: Use when a business with several branches finds the wrong branch page ranking for a town, or branches trading places in results without any change being made.
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# Multi-location cannibalisation
Multiple locations competing for overlapping geography produce a specific failure: search engines cannot decide which page serves which area, so the selection flips. This is an internal signalling problem rather than a content quality one, and it is fixed by making the mapping explicit.
## What you need first
- A list of locations with their true catchment areas
- Ranking data per location page for its target town
- Internal link map and the current URL structure
## Method
1. Map each target town to exactly one location page and record the intended pairing before looking at any data.
2. Compare intended pairing against observed rankings and list every town where a different page appears - flapping between two pages is the signature of cannibalisation, not of a poor page.
3. Check overlapping service areas on the profiles, since two branches claiming the same radius force the ambiguity you are trying to remove.
4. Fix internal linking so each town term links to one page only, and remove the cross-links between branch pages that make them look interchangeable.
5. Differentiate the on-page targeting: distinct title tags, distinct headings, and no shared list of every town on every branch page.
6. Re-measure over at least 30 days and treat stability of the pairing, not raw position, as the success measure.
## What this produces
A one-to-one town-to-page mapping with the internal linking and service area changes made to enforce it, plus a stability measure over 30 days.
## Where this goes wrong
- Adding more content to the losing page, which raises the noise instead of resolving the ambiguity
- Letting every branch page list every town served, which guarantees the pages compete
- Canonicalising one branch page to another and removing a page that had genuine local demand
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/multi-location-cannibalisation
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A one-to-one town-to-page mapping with the internal linking and service area changes made to enforce it, plus a stability measure over 30 days.