Can a Topical Authority Silo Be Too Big?

[VancerX]

How big can you go on a topical authority silo? For example, let's say my niche is insurance. My target page is "Insurance plan "X" ". I then have literally hundreds of keywords I can write about under that specific type of insurance plan that I want to get authority for.

Do I keep them all in the same silo and interlink the target page with all those articles? It would be damn big.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I feel like this is a question about how to go about it whether than if it's right or wrong.

The idea of attaining a stamp of approval and authority for a topic requires publishing as much as you can, if not everything you can, on a topic. That's the point and purpose. There's no such thing as too big, only "not complete". You want to be complete to compete.

As far as trying to make one article the "main article" that all others interlink to in a hub isn't the right way to approach any of this anyways. I'd look at it more like a pyramid, where the longest-tail articles are seated at the bottom. What this does is show you that you can create a hierarchy where there might be many more of these "hub pages" where , instead of having spokes all around, you have the base of the pyramid building upwards.

That doesn't mean articles at the bottom can't skip tiers and link all the way to the top. My opinion is that you should interlink between these articles too. Some would say you shouldn't interlink downwards down the pyramid (or outwards from the hub). I think this is all a bunch of voodoo and magical thinking and just woo-woo to tell people in absence of an actual answer.

If this was me, I'd publish it all, interlink between it where it makes sense, but largely push juice and relevance upwards. I'd make silos within silos with tightly organized topics that interlink between each other and to their own hub, and I'd let all of that where appropriate, but especially the hub page, link up to the next main hub. And than next one has it's own little silo going on, and it flows on upwards to the next, until you reach the capstone of the pyramid, the big money maker.

I don't think it needs to be overly rigid or scientific either. This is more of an organizational exercise than anything else, which is good for you, the user, and Google. But it's not like the whole thing comes tumbling down if an interlink breaks some imaginary rule. I argue that these schemes can reach outside of your own website too, which I call "mini-nets" on the forum.

But yeah, I'd say get it done and let it be damn big. That's what it takes for completeness, and completeness is what it takes to compete. Go harder and further than others are willing to in order to win.

 

[VancerX]

Thanks so much for taking the time to write this. After reading this, I do believe I'm too rigid in my thinking that if a topic is, say, "Insurance Plan X", then every question and every other article related to this plan has to be 100% under that target page, and nowhere else. I'm also now understanding this is quickly becoming a "Just F'ing do it and load it ALL up!" kind of situation. Which I intend to do. Thanks again, super helpful!

 

[Steve Brownlie]

To second @Ryuzaki point that you can overthink this and that just doing as much as you can matters more than being perfect, take a look at the case study I did on here a while back about simplybiz - they dominate the uk biz insurance market - they were doing interlinking and silos in a pretty loose and aggressive way (you can probably think of 10 ways they can improve...) but just doing it at all and at scale was enough to beat the folks not doing much of it at all.

https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...t-value-out-of-your-linkbait-case-study.3058/