Glossary Terms

Page Dilution

Page dilution (also called link dilution) is the reduction in ranking authority that occurs when a page's internal link equity is spread across too many outgoing links or too many competing pages targeting the same query. Picture pouring a pitcher of water into glasses. One pitcher, two glasses, each glass gets a decent amount. One pitcher, twenty glasses, each glass gets a splash. The water did not change. You just divided it into more shares. Ranking authority works the same way. Your site has a finite amount of it. Every link you point somewhere takes a share, and every page you publish on the same topic asks for a share. Spread it thin enough and no single glass holds enough water to matter to Google. There are two separate failures hiding under one name, and the fix is different for each. The first is too many outgoing links on a single page, which thins the share of authority each link carries. That mechanic is link dilution. The second is bigger and quieter. It happens when several pages on your own site target the same search query. Say you have a service page, an old blog post, and a landing page all written around "wedding photographer Niagara." Google has to pick one to rank, and your three pages split the signal between them. Often none of them ranks well, because each one looks like a weaker version of the other two. This is called keyword cannibalization, and most site owners never notice they are doing it. They think more pages on a topic means more chances to rank. It usually means the opposite. WordPress makes both failures easy to commit by accident. Categories, tags, and archives generate pages automatically, so you can end up with a tag archive, a category archive, and a published post all competing for the same term without writing a single one of them on purpose. Tidy taxonomy keeps that under control. The fix is consolidation, not addition. Find the pages competing for the same query and merge them into one strong page, then redirect the others to it. Prune outgoing links that do not earn their place. Point your internal links at the one page you actually want to rank. When I audit a site that "has lots of content but does not rank," page dilution is the first thing I check. The pages are usually competing with each other. The work is deciding which page wins and making every other page point at it.