Rate my Silo Structure

[returntrip]

Hey Builders,

I'm currently doubling down on a new site and finally putting something together where I think I can add value to the niche. I have a question about grouping my topic the best that I can at this stage.

I've set up my content like this (Not my niche*):

1. I have a top level guide (something like "Hunting Essentials") which acts as an overview and rundown a number of topics with CTAs to the page content written in #2. I figured this would be easy to share and tell a story of what the user needs to get what they need to be done (buy these products, learn if they need them, etc).
   
   
2. Each topic has its own page in WordPress which will act as another jump off point for my users, these pages drill down and talk about each topic in-depth. Think "All About Hunting Knives", "Hunting Rain Gear Guide" etc.
   
   
3. From those pages, I'll have buyers intent content "Best Foldable Hunting Knives". I built out some posts and categories for this level of content which will sit under something like "/gear/hunting-knives/best-foldable-hunting-knives".

My question would be, should I 301 my category pages back to the topic pages mentioned in #2? Are there any ramifications in doing this? As an example: "/gear/hunting-knives" would redirect back to the "All About Hunting Knives" page.

Sorry if this has been discussed before, I took a quick look around and did a search but I'd like to hear about this from some of you smart people about it. I might be overthinking all this but I just want to get a solid foundation down as this still will end up getting pretty content heavy and I want to avoid any big mistakes in structure.

 

[returntrip]

I found another thread here that kinda answers my question in case anyone else is interested. My bad!

 

[Ryuzaki]

My question would be, should I 301 my category pages back to the topic pages mentioned in #2?

I'm assuming you're talking about Wordpress (is this true?).

I think this setup of yours is unnecessarily complicated. You're creating pages to act as the "head of the categories" and then creating actual categories. Are you creating the categories in able to get the /gear/hunting-knives/best-foldable-hunting-knives/ URL setup?

If that's the case, I think there's two better ways to do this without the complication and potential future confusion of 301's.

One would be to simply build out your posts as pages, making them sub-pages of the main "category lander" page. When you create sub-pages, you keep the main page's slug in the URL. So if your "category lander" is /hunting-knives/ and then you create a sub-page for "Best Foldable Hunting Knives" you'd end up with a slug like /hunting-knives/best-foldable-hunting-knives/. You wouldn't have "Gear" in the URL this way unless you make it a grand-parent page.

The other way would be to drop the idea of building a "Page" (page as in the Wordpress content type) and create categories like you normally would. You'd create your /hunting-knives/ category, and then tell your permalinks to include /%category%/%post-name%/ (or something like that). Then every post in that category would have your URL structure as described. You could even make the "gear" category and make "hunting-knives" a sub-category.

Then, you could create "category templates" (category-hunting-knives.php I think, please double check all this) for each category you want a special "lander" for like you built with the pages. Or, perhaps even better, you could create one new category template (category.php).

In your new category.php, you could place the loop that pulls up all the various posts in the category as an "else", and set up a different if condition like...

<?php
    if ( is_category( 'hunting-knives' ) ) {
        /* new WP_Query to pull the_content() for the hunting knives page */
    } elseif ( is_category( 'hunting-rifles' ) {
        /* new WP_Query to pull the_content() for the hunting rifles page */
    } else {
        /* Show the original loop for categories without special landers */
    }
?>

If you feel comfortable doing this, this is probably the cleanest and least confusing method in terms of trying to remember what the heck you did 2 years from now. If you're using a pre-built theme, do this in a child theme.[/code]