Question about silo structures

[built]

I'm kind of confused now, most diagrams I see are like this:

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So should my home page be linking to the actual category pages or should they be linking to the main pillar posts?

 

[Calamari]

Both. From your home page link to your best content for your visitors. If you're looking to "flow juice" through the site link to the categories as well.

 

[stackcash]

You'll hear a lot of different opinions on this...mostly regarding link juice leakage.

The homepage issue only comes into play if you're actively trying to rank your homepage for a specific keyword. In reality, your homepage isn't going to be the money page on your site...so it's not necessarily the page you'll focus all your efforts on. Thus, as @Calamari said, you'll want to have all your most important content linked to from the homepage. This just makes it easier for anyone landing on your homepage to find your money pages.

However, in a strict silo structure, you would only link to your silo pages from the homepage. This would be if you're trying to rank your homepage for your main keyword. Essentially, each silo will be a tightly grouped section of content that all focuses on one very-specific subtopic. The idea here is that a silo that is so hyper-relevant to a single subtopic is going to rank faster than a site that is all over the place with their site hierarchy.

Think of each silo as a pyramid. The silo head will focus on a general subtopic, which will also be your 2nd-most important keywords you want the entire site to rank for. Next step down is your core content within the silo. These will focus on your tertiary keywords. And finally, the base of the pyramid would be supporting content for the silo - which focuses on informational, long-tail keywords within the silo topic.

Each silo will only link to articles/topics within it's given silo. You can, and should, link out to other websites. But, you don't want to link from one silo to another silo. The reason for this is that you'll reduce the silos relevance to one specific topic if you link out to silos that focus on separate topics. Again, it's all about the relevance.

The idea here is that your long-tail articles will get traffic first, since they're focusing on the least competitive keywords in the silo. The link juice you send to these pages will filter up the pyramid to your category pages, silo head, and ultimately your homepage.... helping everything to rank much, much faster.

 

[built]

I see so it's not really a one size fits all approach? It depends on what you're trying to do/rank for.

I think for my site it would be better to link to guides rather than my category pages.

 

[stackcash]

The thing about all this digital marketing stuff is that EVERYTHING is dynamic......so your content planning, site hierarchy, link building, content creation, etc will all change from site to site based on your goals.

Also, when it comes to silos, don't think that each part of the pyramid has very specific rules. Just plug your content into each pyramid level as you see fit. For instance, your guides could very well be your category pages.

The bottom line is that you want your link juice to flow from the pages that get it the fastest all the way up to your homepage as fast as possible. So, when you're building your silos, just make sure that you keep them as relevant as possible, and that your link juice won't "leak" anywhere you don't want it to go.

 

[CCarter]

The bottom line is that you want your link juice to flow from the pages that get it the fastest all the way up to your homepage as fast as possible.

I want to clarify something: The "link juice" to your homepage hardens your homepage's power. However since there are different scenarios, that doesn't necessarily mean you want the visitors going to your homepage as the end goal. For some websites it's the exact opposite. The end goal for a SAAS or eCommerce site for example is for the visitor to become a customer or checkout a product by visiting specific pages designated towards that goal.

The end goal of a website that's doing mostly display advertisement for revenue would be to have someone eventually click on an ad, so the visitor's flow to the homepage make sense in that scenario to get a broader understanding of what other things the website has to offer, then go to more appropriate pages (which should be within the silo itself). Since it's display, the revenue opportunities are on all most all pages, and you as the owner want to create relevant enough silos so the advertisement that shows up is extremely relevant to their interest, and get that click. Same scenario as with an affiliate offer.

The way the website makes money should determine the flow of the traffic. That's where there is a disconnect with "SEOed websites", since the goal of SEOing is to boost up the whole website (usually done by boosting up the homepage) in the search rankings as an indirect way of creating revenue (increasing traffic), versus the direct revenue way of focused linking that direct users to checkout pages for example. This is why the way SEOs think about websites is sometimes backwards in my opinion, cause they want to boost the homepage, but the primary purpose should be to generate revenue, meaning the links created should flow in the opposite direction away from the homepage, since the homepage is rarely the page which converts into a sale for ecommerce, SAASes, etc.

Siloing for "SEO benefit" is different than creating links to flow users down to the revenue generating pages in eCommerce, SAAS, and lead generation instances. It's complicating but not really, you have to consider where you want your users to end up, on a checkout page or another website to buy a service/product since you are using display advertising (Adsense) or CPA (affiliate offers).

Two comparisons that come to mind to help people a bit more lost, think of an outdoor community park versus a retail store that sells TVs - both are destinations (websites). At the park you want people to linger a bit and explore the whole park so they'll keep coming back (Display Advertising focused). At the retail store you want people to come in as quickly as possible, make a selection as quickly as possible, then buy your product - while having a great customer service experience so they can recommend you to their friends (eCommerce). You aren't looking for people to linger around in your store just to hang out where you would be at the park.

The main think to keep in mind is HOW you generate revenue from the website. If it is display advertising then hardening the homepage makes sense since it will rise the tide of all the content. If it is eCommerce than the traffic should flow towards the money maker pages that are converting visitors into sales.

This internet marketing stuff is more of an "art" than a science at times, since you are dealing with humans and have to change the way you do things so the humans will follow the paths you want them to.

 

[stackcash]

I want to clarify something: ...

All correct. Was just trying not to further confuse the topic for someone that is just starting to learn about it.

Having him get 70% of the way there is probably better than overwhelming him....causing him to take not action at all.

 

[juliantrueflynn]

Wherever you took this map they weren't thinking of WordPress (you would near to delete the 2nd row for it to be like the basic WP install). You could set up WP with this, but it would require more customization on your end which may not be worth it depending on the size of the site.

The basic takeaways that you should be taking from it though are:

1. The relevancy of internal linking matters.
2. The directory/folder of the content matters (fit content into silos).
3. Global or irrelevant linking can diminish relevancy of the content (link within silos).
4. You should be internally linking more to the content/silo that is more relevant/important to your site. Within the silo internally link more to the child page that is most relevant/important.
5. Contextual links are treated different than links in your sidebar, nav, etc.

Not all of that is the idea of siloing but internal linking strategy too (there's a lot of crossover).

Again with anything SEO these are just guidelines/best practices. You won't notice huge effects on smaller paged sites either. This is the stuff that makes me love working on sites with 100k-1 million pages though where one change to your internal linking strategy and structure makes for huge changes in results. You'll notice a lot of websites breaking this (ex. mega-menus, huge footer areas linking to everything, etc) and still ranking well--you can do a lot wrong, you just have to do a little right. UX should totally come 1st and siloing shouldn't get in the way of that, siloing is Google attempting to make websites more understandable.

For WP (which I assume you're using) if you wanted to do this you have to play with their permalink settings. Let's say you have a site where you have:

• blog area for news/updates
• info pages (ex. buyer's guide)
• shop (WooCommerce)

Your WP permalinks would be formatted like this: /blog/%category%/%postname%. WooCommerce in permalinks you just select 'shop base with category'.

This would leave your site structured like:

• example.com/blog
• example.com/blog/foo-tax/foo-single
• example.com/shop
• example.com/shop/widgets-tax/widget-single

If you have more silos (ex. you also had a directory) then you would need to take a look at WP custom post types. Within custom post types you can change the base folder so it won't affect the rest of the WP using this PHP while making the post type: 'rewrite' => array('with_front' => false, 'slug' => 'your-slug'). This would be making it closer to the map you linked.

 

[built]

Thanks for the replies. I'm starting to understand this now.

I now understand the basics that @stackcash mentioned of a silo, and how it helps.

From what I understand from @CCarter the type of silo you go with depends on your monetization method? To homepage vs checkout page

@juliantrueflynn you said this "Your WP permalinks would be formatted like this: /blog/%category%/%postname%."

Is this going to make or break the silo? Since I have my posts structured just mydomain.com/%postname%

 

[juliantrueflynn]

Yea, I mean you see how it would, right? If you have a folder structure for your blog and the posts are not in that folder they are out of the silo.

This is splitting hairs though and where you have to start making some decisions because social media friendly sites like to keep things close to the root and ignore siloing posts.

 

[built]

Yea, I mean you see how it would, right? If you have a folder structure for your blog and the posts are not in that folder they are out of the silo.

This is splitting hairs though and where you have to start making some decisions because social media friendly sites like to keep things close to the root and ignore siloing posts.

Yeah I see, I definitely want to change the structure. Is there a way to do with this .htaccess so I dont lose my links?

I'd rather set this up now while I have minimal content.

Edit: Im guessing I can just use a normal 301 redirect?

 

[stackcash]

Google values short URLs.

If your internal linking structure is solid and doesn't leak anything out of your silo, I doubt that not having a traditional subdirectory structure is going to hurt very much.

This is where testing comes in handy!

 

[juliantrueflynn]

To go off what @stackcash said. I've edited--I want to say under 20 sites--around 15k-100k pages switching mostly from /%postname% to /blog/%postname% (or a variation of that).

The effects were tiny and there was no drops/issues, trying my best to isolate the experiment. There would be minor jumps just from Google recrawling everything but then it settled down. So, it really is splitting hairs like I said earlier. Internal structure will play a more crucial role when used with a internal link strategy. I agree with @stackcash that Google favors shorter URL length.

Matt Cutts confirmed this too, biased but they're good for site structure advice. In short, he says how the number of subfolders doesn't matter (to a point) but descriptive URLs help Google understand the content better.

Saying all that, should you still do it? Up to you and the strategy with the site. You can PM me the site if you want and I can tell you what I would do. I can say ahead of time I'm usually on the stricter side with best practices. Even though I said above adding or removing the blog folder didn't boost/hurt organic I've had numerous cases where improving just the siloing/structure gave me noticeable increases. There's more at play.

For applying the change you are right about doing a 301 redirect. You should be able to redirect each post to the blog folder with a wildcard redirect. I would check quick if WP does an automatic redirect when changing the permalink, I've had cases where WP does that for me but never figured out the conditions for it. Might save you time though.

 

[Calamari]

You guys are confusing poor @built and your going to have him making unnecessary changes before sundown.

Please don't change your url structure now. There's nothing wrong with the structure you have and changing it now will do more damage than good, if it will even do any good at all.

 

[juliantrueflynn]

@Calamari always respect someone trying to keep it simple, but this isn't the scenario. To me it seems like you answered what he thinks his question is, when he is confused about siloing in general, which means having to elaborate on points.

He just sent me the site and yea he would benefit and I gave him a new permalink structure to put from both a longterm WP perspective (WP hates just %postname) and SEO (he could use the descriptive urls the way his site is built).

 

[Ryuzaki]

Silo's aren't quite like they were back in the day of flat file websites with no main navigation.

Google mitigates the flow of PR juice through various types of links. Your navigation and footer and sidebar links are going to pass less juice than through the main content. I see people obsessing about the link structure of silo's to the point where they want to not use navigation and what not. Google has that sorted out for you.

All you really need to do these days is use categories and include breadcrumbs and Google will work out the silo. Then either make your top-level category a main content page that includes links to your sub-pages, or don't and just choose an article in the category to serve as your silo head. Then link back to it from the rest.

Silo's are about two things:

1. Controlling PR juice flow (over do this and you're going to get Panda'd)
2. Content relevancy

Wordpress basically does this for you now, and Google alters itself to match Wordpress and the rest of the CMS's out there. Just use taxonomies (categories or tags) and have breadcrumbs. Then your job is just to set up the internal links in the main content to point in the obvious direction.

Now that your juice flow is controlled by you in the main content and by Google in the supplemental content, and the relevancy flow is controlled by you through internal links and by Google by reading your taxonomies and breadcrumbs, all you need to do is build as many links as you can to all the pages in the silo till the main one pops.

 

[built]

Thanks for the help guys, got my site set up correctly. Now its time to do work and set up a solid base