Hard silos or soft silo enough?

[vortex]

Hi,

I'm currently trying to revive a site of mine. I'm trying to build 'topical authority' with content clusters and interlinking. Now I read its good to have a URL structure like /category1/products - basically have a "hard" SILO. When i started the site I did not build any category URL slugs so all my URLs are like this: wwwl.site.com/URL1 , wwwl.site.com/URL2 etc

Now the question is, is it good enough to build topical authority by "just" interlinking those posts - and leaving URL structure alone?

 

[WinMore]

I don't believe you need the hard silo, it's just easier for you.

Google maps your topical authority by what's on the page + incoming and outgoing links.
I believe the silo idea was originally to force the topic down googles throat. Just by interlinking in an intelligent way you should be fine.

There might be some signals that also come from the URL, so there the "category1" thing could give an extra clue, but you could also make sure your final slug makes sense.
site.com/leash-for-brown-dogs should be fine.

Personally, I would add the category for future posts and maybe add the correct tag to the existing ones.
Pages that already have backlinks I would not touch.

I'm curious what others think. I guess 301 the pages to a new slug with the category could also work, but as I understand it, that would slow you down a bit.

 

[UFO]

Now the question is, is it good enough to build topical authority by "just" interlinking those posts - and leaving URL structure alone?

According to this article about Kyle Roof's reverse silo technique, yes. The article claims the physical or what you're referring to as the "hard" silo is irrelevant and the link juice isn't passed through the URL structure. They don't provide any data but if it's coming from Kyle Roof there's a lot of testing behind it.