How two of your own pages end up suppressing each other, and how to consolidate them.
Cannibalisation is when two of your own pages compete for the same query, and the result is that neither ranks as well as one page would have.
How to actually confirm it
The symptom is a query where the ranking URL keeps swapping between two of your pages, often with position bouncing between six and fifteen. Search Console's query report, filtered to one query and grouped by page, shows this clearly. Two pages splitting impressions on the same term is the confirmation.
It is usually a content-planning failure
The cause is rarely technical. It is two writers, eighteen months apart, covering the same topic from slightly different angles, or a service page and a blog post that ended up saying the same thing. Large sites accumulate this steadily without any single mistake.
Consolidate rather than delete
Pick the stronger page, merge the useful content from the weaker one into it, then 301 the weaker URL to the survivor. Update internal links so they point at the consolidated page. Deleting without redirecting throws away whatever authority the old page had earned.
Keep a simple content map of which page owns which primary topic. It takes an afternoon to build and prevents the problem recurring.
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