Building A Content Silo Using Wordpress

Asad

Asad

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I am building a new wordpress website, and instead of throwing shit at the wall, I am siloing and trying to do things the right way for once. My issue is that worpress seems already set up to do this. Here is the process that I am following
I am using Pages (rather than Posts) to build silo
    • I am creating a page for each of my Secondary Keywords (titled with that exact keyword)

      • I will Link homepage to secondary keyword pages

      • I will Link secondary keyword pages back to homepage
    • Under secondary keywords menu tab. I will have posts with tertiary (long tail) keywords and link all posts back to secondary keyword. Those posts support the secondary keywords and should also link back to the homepage

    • The posts under every single silo will also link back to home page in addition to secondary keyword page

    • At bottom of secondary keyword page, I will use related posts but ONLY from that category!

    • I will Include recent posts in the sidebar FOR THAT CATEGORY ONLY!
My question is,will the wordpress nav bar interfere with this structure since technically every page will link back to the pages in the nav bar? Am I missing something here?
 
Site navigation typically breaks the whole silo logic. It's okay to link back to main categories. Working towards creating a silo you'll end up creating a good site structure that creates content themes but, that shouldn't stop you from linking to pages that users would find valuable.
 
Yes, the navigation breaks the strict silo linking but at the same time Google sends less page rank through navigation links and probably doesn't pass any relevancy signals through it, the sidebar, or the footer. So I wouldn't worry about that.

What I would worry about is trying to use the homepage as your silo-head. It seems that Google is far less interested in ranking homepages for anything but Brand terms these days. It's far easier to rank an internal page. Blame the exact-match-domain spammers.

With that being said, it's still possible though. I sold an EMD site about a year ago ranking for the exact match that was in the homepage, but I also made a huge effort to make that term into the "brand" as well. I have another similar site aging at the moment too, sitting on page 4. But I'm also not worrying about the EMD term either. It's the long-tails that bring the cash.

That's something to think about. Is this a small site for a small term or a huge long-term site. If the latter then I'd shift your entire plan down from the homepage to an inner page.
 
I silo like this:

  • Category archive substituted for a Category Landing Page (CLP)
  • CLP = informative, awesome content broken into sections, each linking down to a more in-depth post on the topic.
  • End of page lists all posts in the category
  • Each individual post links both upward and across within silo
Pretty simple?
 
I was so busy imllementing that I forgot to swing back by and say thanks @Kevin and @Ryuzaki ...you two seem to always be on top of everything!
 
So now that I am siloing my new site, I am looking at some old ones that are monsters with 1000 + pages of content. Would siloing help or hurt these older sites? I mean, wouldnt changing up my structure dramatically cause a drop in my serps? I dont know if that question makes sense, but it seems like every time make changes to sites, I get dropped and would have to work my way back up. Would siloing a 4 year old site be an improvement? Thanks, all. Try not to scream NOOB at the screen. LOL.
 
If you are changing the url structure make sure to put 301 redirects in place. You may see a temporary drop in rank as Google gets the redirects sorted. If you are just changing your internal linking you should be fine.
 
@ryandiscord thanks, pal. Any way to do this automatically? I cant imagine doing 301s for a thousand pages.
 
It really depends on what exactly you are trying to do. You can probably create redirect rules in .htaccess to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Say you have a directory structure like this "example.com/old-category/some-post", you could take all of the posts in "/old-category/" and redirect it to a new path like "/new-category/sub-category/" with a redirect rule like this:
Code: 
RewriteRule ^old-category/(.*)$ /new-category/sub-category/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

You could also check out this wordpress plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ There's a feature in this called "Monitor changes to posts" and it will automatically create redirects wherever your new posts go. I don't typically use it because I like to have full control of redirects but, it may be worth exploring for your situation. You can also bulk import a csv of redirects if you want more control.
 
Asad said:
I am looking at some old ones that are monsters with 1000 + pages of content. Would siloing help or hurt these older sites?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't waste time or effort redirecting 1000+ pages of content. The disasters outweighed the benefit if you truly have 1000+ pages. Yes you can, but why? Traffic is already there.

Now if there are pages that are not performing and get little traffic, create an updated version of the content and redirect that old page.

Also needing a wordpress plugin for 301ing means there will be overhead at some level. That plugin might be great for a couple dozen posts, but 1000+, sound like a disaster waiting to happens. You are better off creating new updated content and concentrating on the future, not the past.
 
Kevin said:
Category archive substituted for a Category Landing Page (CLP)
Click to expand...

Hi @Kevin by this, do you mean that you create new pages for every new category (read: silo-head) on the site and then totally ignore using the category archives (or any taxonomies) entirely?

I'm not sure my point was clear enough, but let me expatiate;

I have an old site with a few posts (33 precisely) and I am looking to properly organize those articles into silos and build a proper site architecture.

What I am thinking of doing is:

- Create a new WordPress page for every major theme on the site.
- Publish a beastly resource on those pages and break up the resource into sections, linking to every post which falls into that theme.
- Delete the category archives previously set up and 301 their links to the pages created
- No-index all taxonomies (categories and tags) by removing them from my sitemap - plan on using Yoast for this...
... and finally ...
- Update each individual page each time a new article is published within that page's silo.

Does this make sense?

@Ryuzaki & @CCarter I would be elated if you can help out with this (or point me to a post which does).

:smile:
 
@Kay, I'm not a fan of silo-ing as classically understood. It's old. I realize you're not being as strict about it as some people try to be, which is what I'm against.

Think about this before you delete your category pages. Wordpress provides a category_description(); function that will spit out HTML markup:
Code: 
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
If you navigate to in Dashboard > Posts > Categories > and click the category name, you're provided a box where you can write as much HTML as you like. I think the new Wordpress even has a text editor in there now.

So if you set up your category template to print that information at the top, and then go to Settings > Reading > Blog Pages Show At Most X you can put 9999 and it will show all of your posts there, including featured images and excerpts if your theme is set up for it.

Bam, you have your silo header without all the extra headaches of redirects or even manual intervention when you publish new posts.

And this is why I'm against all of this talk about silo's. It makes people think everything is complicated when in fact CMS's are already set up this way, AND Google doesn't seem to calculate things in this way. Between categories, tags, bread crumbs, interlinking on-site AND off-site (content relevancy) they form virtual silo's (versus the strict "physical" silos of the past in the 1990's and early 2000's). It's as old as meta-keywords and keyword stuffing.

I've been calling this "relevancy mini-nets" in my own mind lately. They transcend strict silo's which demand silly interlinking that's horrible for user experience, in that Google now understands linking more than "a link is a link." They know about navigation, footers, sidebars and other supplementary content. They know to pass more page rank and weigh more heavily "contextual" links. And those aren't just on your own site.
 
So @Ryuzaki, what do you suggest I do with my new longterm best product/reviews site? At the moment I am disregarding the homepage, making a page with 1000+ words for the "best xyz"/"xyz reviews" keywords with a table (tablepress) as well as mini reviews (200 words, 5+ products) with a link to a 500+ word review page which is a sub-page of the "best xyz"/"xyz reviews" page. e.g. domain.com/best-duck-pond/quack-duckpond-1500XL-review/ which links back to the "best xyz"/"xyz reviews" page with different anchors such as "best xyz" or "our xyz reviews page" etc.

Any tips?
 
@GrindingTo10K, your set up sounds fine. If you're talking about 5 to 10 sub-pages, that seems okay. That's the kind of "relevancy net" I'm talking about. I think you could do it without child and parent pages all the same, but the URL hierarchy is another part of the "virtual silo."

I don't do individual product reviews, but I'll write a solid 3 to 5 info articles about a product after I publish the review to link in and form a relevancy net. I'll do it off-page if it's easy too, like open registration sites with dofollow links (even nofollow at times like Medium).

To follow your example I'd be like...
  • The Best Duck Ponds
    • How Many Ducks is Too Many In My Duck Pond?
    • Should I Take Peyote And Jump in the Duck Pond?
    • Why Are Duck Ponds Full of Feathers?
    • How Many Gallons of Milk Can a Duck Pond Hold?
I'll scatter them all around my site in different categories and link them back to the review page. "Relevancy" Net, versus Silo. To me, it's all the same and works just as well without confining you to a certain non-user-friendly site design. And it stretches off site (to open reg blog sites, social media, forums, etc.).
 
Ryuzaki said:
I'll do it off-page if it's easy too, like open registration sites with dofollow links (even nofollow at times like Medium).
Click to expand...

Can you give me an example of an open registration site that you'd use, or is there a list somewhere? Do you mean web 2.0's like Tumblr or Blogger? And with the off-page do you use link to the review page or the supporting pages?
 
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