(Entry was posted by Neil Cheesma on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/27/2017).

What is the best way to remove this cannibalisation?

a handful of (2-3 years old ranked in top 100 but not on page 1/2) posts are cannabilising key phrases from other urls - due to having the key phrase (inadvertently) placed into the url (due to being part of the title). Not a lot of traffic to those urls (not sure about backlinks) There are social shares and unique content. What is the best way to remove this cannibalisation? Edit the url and simply redirect old to new? (hoping that Google will see that the relevant key phrase isn`t there anymore)

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Alan Bleiweiss: If you are going to redirect to the new pages, there is no need to edit the URLs. In fact, if you edit the URLs that would itself require redirects. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you envision though.
Neil Cheesman: Essentially "What is the best way to remove this cannibalisation?" if there is a `best` way...
Steve Gerencser: We had this issue with a client a while back. And while trying determine the best approach those pages hit page 1 and now we have 3 slots out of 7 for some core searches. So I left it alone. ðŸ˜
Jeremy L. Knauff: I can`t say for sure without seeing the content, but you`re almost certainly better off placing a link in the content from those pages to the page that you want to rank.