Ranking Category Pages - Website Architecture

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Hi.

So im in a the middle of a making a nice authority website and ive hit a wall. I crafting my content and what not, and traffic is looking good. However..after every couple of articles i keep second guessing my content structure strategy.

Currently im trying my crack at making my category pages a 'perfect' website silo. In my structure i try to rank the category page.

fruits.com/category/banana/benefits-of-bananas/
fruits.com/category/banana/‎Musa-acuminata/
fruits.com/category/banana/‎Musa/

fruits.com/category/apple/fuji/

etc.

Eventually i want to cover all 'fruits' but it seems like i will a lot of category pages. Should i be taking a different approach and do what most web masters do and put all my content under 5-6 different categories?

And again, im trying to tightly silo all of my content, and went with this way of doing it. It seems to be doing just fine in terms of traffic, but i could use some advise before i move forward.
#search engine optimization #architecture #category #pages #ranking #website
  • Honestly if you are going to cover all fruits, you really need to work on a lot of pages considering the fruits' varieties we have. For me I'd categorized it the same way as you are doing, as I can see it is more organized that way.

    Let's hear some other opinions though.
    • [1] reply
    • Yes. That's a good idea. Not sure how he can do it with just 10-15 categories, but this way he can also make the domain name much better!
  • I will assume you are using wordpress? Part of the issue is "category" you are pointing all of your "Silo" work to a basically non existing page.. well it exist... its simply dynamic, and not static. you need to remove the "Category" page from your structure.

    IF you go in and look you will see you are currently using 2 URL structures. Category structure, and post structure. a nice little plugin such as: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-no-category-base/ will actually remove the "category" from your URL. a simple fix to a more complicated issue.

    Part of the issue you are going to run into with attempting "Silo" structure with wordpress is how wordpress actually organizes the content behind the scenes. it does NOT follow silo structure in the least. It dictates structure based on date, and has nothing to do with category ( Silo )

    So if for example you wrote 3 articles today. One for Apples, another for banana's and the last for oranges... that is the structure chain that is present. Apples didn't go into apples... Oranges didn't go into oranges and bananas didn't go into bananas. SURE in the navigation portion of the site you can see... everything is where it needs to be, but that is not silo.

    I will bet most anyone that does silo structure actually has a folder for each silo they are creating. Apples and all of its related content goes into a "Apple" folder. Bananas into a "banana" folder. The structure itself dictates that content based on context is contained and separated. THAT is Silo.

    Unfortunately that becomes a bit difficult to accomplish with wordpress.

    Don't get me wrong in all of this. using the above plugin to clean up your URL structure is a great start. Publishing articles to your site in batches is a great thing to do. Submit 5 articles in any of your subject silos at once. 5 apple articles. 5 banana articles etc. basically the more the merrier.

    When setting up Silo structure within the confines of Wordpress you need to think of it more as a linking structure than a platform structure. YES you will get benefit from your labor. but mechanically it will never be as "good" as non wordpress based platform silo structure.

    Hope that Helps!
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Yeah actually that helps alot. I am kind of disappointed to say the least. However, i will continue to keep doing what i am doing i guess.....

      Also, yes i do use that plug-in, i just wanted to emphsis that i am indeed using categories . Thanks for replying!

      So to 'silo' in wordpress you would have to say...publish 20 articles all at once in the same...content area to show ... authority.
      • [1] reply
  • I Suggest you use Wordpress Plugin by Yoast. It will also remove the category slug off your post url and remember that you'll have to order your articles correspondingly with the categories.
    • [1] reply

    • If you are saying Youst does that..i wont argue that. but you don't need Yoast to do this for POST's. you can go in and set this in the taxonomy section of wordpress. Its the "Categories" that Wordpress creates that need special outside attention.
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