Guide
Keyword cannibalization — two of your own pages ranking for the same query and splitting the relevance signal between them — usually isn't a content problem. It's a linking problem. Here's the structure we use to avoid it.
Each cluster gets one hub page covering the broad topic, and several spoke pages covering specific variations. The hub links down to every spoke. Every spoke links back up to the hub, and sideways to two or three closely related spokes — never to every other page in the cluster.
A link's anchor text should describe what the linked page is about, not what the current page is about. This sounds obvious and is the single most common mistake we see — generic "click here" or "learn more" anchors that give Google nothing to work with.
If two pages in a cluster could both reasonably rank for the same head term, pick one as the primary target and have the other link to it with that term as anchor text. That link is a vote for which page should win — without it, Google has to guess, and it often guesses wrong or splits the signal between both.
A fully interlinked cluster looks dense, but it dilutes the signal — every page passing equal weight to every other page means none of them stands out as the authority. The hub-and-spoke structure exists specifically to avoid this.
This whole process is exactly what's in the pSEO template — clustering, internal linking, publishing cadence, all of it.
See the template