What is "silo site"?

Here's a quick rundown on silo site structure

What is Website Silo Site Architecture?

I have an overview of silo SEO link structures at SEO Silo Theme

The WP theme I develop includes advanced options for building a silo link structure without messing around with creating extra pages or changing permalink structures.

I'm hoping those into silo SEO link structures here have moved on from believing when using WordPress they need the category slug as part of the permalink structure.

I use popular and recent posts widgets for example that will automatically create silo link structures.

David

Hi Gnr,

There are great websites hidden from widespread search engine results (SERPs) exposure because they lack an organic search engine optimization strategy or their strategy does not include enough attention to clear subject relevance or siloing. In this document you will find a strategy for improving the clarity of a website's overall theme through siloing with the intent to improve keyword rankings.

Website silo architecture is the process of implementing a structure whereby each topic is housed in it’s own mini-site within the site and the internal linking pushes ranking factor back up to the primary / topic page otherwise dubbed the “silo landing page”.

Agree with Yukon, using things like recent posts and popular posts goes against the whole point of siloing. Much better off using static pages if possible, unless you need to manage 100s of pages on your site.

You are absolutely right with most WordPress themes adding popular and/or recent posts widgets completely defeats the whole point of trying to build a silo link structure.

On your average WP theme:
The popular posts widget will load the most popular posts sitewide.
The recent posts widget will load the most recent posts sitewide.
Actually most widgets with links (category widget for example) will add links sitewide.

This will damage any silo link structures you have built.

That's the point Yukon made and I'm in complete agreement.

That's not how Stallion Responsive works.

The popular and recent posts widgets (built using the Stallion SEO Posts widget: built into Stallion Responsive) I use have an option to only load posts from the same category (or a set of categories, most SEO feature rich widget you'll ever see).

The way I use it depends on the site, I'm in the process of siloing a Free Funny Jokes (want to see the site search Google for White Jokes, normally number 3 in Google: warning: filled with racist jokes and comments). In the process of SEOing the content again (been years since I worked on it, needs some serious TLC) for better silo SEO and gone with a simple silo setup with the popular and recent posts widgets to only load the posts from the category a post is in. Which means as long as the posts added to a category are tightly niched the popular and recent posts widget automatically generates a silo link structure: basically setup two widgets and was done.

On the home page (and some other pages) the widgets load posts from all categories (like most WP themes work).
Go to a category and posts in that category and the widgets only load posts from that category, for example go to the Money Jokes category and you'll see jokes related to money/business. I'm still working on this site, I'll probably break the niches down further as I SEO more posts to even tighter niche the silos.

Also have the site set to not load the category widget sitewide. The category widget (using the WP tagcloud loading categories) loads on the home page, on categories, tags, search, but not on WordPress posts. Means I get a decent amount of link benefit spread through the site via category links to posts, but on posts (where the main content I want ranked is) the category links are NOT loaded.

So on the average WordPress post the vast majority of links out will use relevant anchor text to the posts content without completely limiting the flow of link benefit through the site. It works, that site ranks high for a fair number of high traffic SERPs (lots of racist joke SERPs: they are some of the most highest traffic joke SERPs).

Have all this described at a Silo SEO Tutorial I wrote (search Google for Silo SEO Dave, 1st result) where you can also see the Popular Posts widget (left sidebar) loads the most popular posts from three related categories SEO Tutorial, WordPress SEO Tutorial and Yoast WordPress SEO tutorials (I picked three related cats, all related to SEO Tutorial) and the Recent Post Widget only loads the recent posts from that category the post is in.

I also use comments to further silo individual posts. I've developed a feature which allows comments to be indexed in their own right and they are SEO'd (optimized title tag, H1 header, links in/out) and if used with SEO in mind can help target a set of SERPs vis the anchor text of the links to the indexed comments. If you look at the Silo posts comments there's links with anchor text "Over-Optimized Silo Structure", "Failed SILO SEO Experiment" etc... which are related to the SERPs targeted: for example one of the comments is ranked number 1 in Google for "Failed SILO SEO" (that's a comment indexed, not the main article). All adds to the main articles SEO, pretty cool set of SEO features to achieve this.

The only links not siloed on the two sites are the top navigation menu links, plan to build a feature to choose a different nav menu for different sections of the site. the comments on the joke site also need better optimization, it's generated over 30,000 comments and users tend not to think SEO when writing them: ideally I'd make sure all the comments have an SEO'd comment title (theme SEO feature), even without this SEO the site ranks high for some hard SERPs.

By using Stallion Responsive I can silo an entire site filled with thousands of WordPress posts in minutes. As long as the categories are tightly niched, the internal links will be tightly niched. Can you achieve better adding manual links, of course you can, but who has the time to manually add tens of thousands of links on huge sites?

Not a newb to SEO either, been researching SEO for about 15 years, made a living as an SEO consultant for ~10 years (shut my SEO business down), now make a living from my own network of sites.

David

Maybe now we can get back to discussing silo SEO.

Silo is an SEO technique that create strong keyword related theme on your site, improving the relevancy of your site in the eyes of the search engines.