If You're Not Using a "SILO" structure in SEO... You Better Start

I use Silos on my own sites, because I've seen what they can do in the SERPs. Plus If done correctly the Silo will help traffic navigate the site in a logical way.

I would be careful on the Google Images when looking at Silo info. some of those guys got stuck on the idea of linking out of the bottom of the first Silo to the 2nd Silo for no reason, they link regardless If the pages are related or not. Linking out to unrelated pages isn't a a good idea IMO, it dilutes the whole purpose of creating a Silo (tightly themed pages).

You guys got any links for more information on the SILO structure? I did some Googling, but didn't find anything that clicked for me.

It may work well but the whole "you wont rank well" thing is just completely wrong.

I've never used this structure and have multiple #1 rankings

A bunch of BS.

Silo-ing is just a theory, it's catered more towards having a good user experience. In my experience, the flatter the site architecture, the easier it is to get indexed and be deemed relevant.

You also rank much faster with a cross-linking structure over a siloing structure.

The only reason why silo-ing works is because it's used on a HUGE site with nearly hundred thousands of pages... Together with an aged domain.

-WittyBlogger

I think silo is a new challenge for me

If you properly silo the site, it can mitigate the need to get lot of domain names, as each
category in the silo can become a 'micro niche site' by itself. It can contain independent mini-niches, for example, for weight loss diets: weight loss can be the main niche and each category can be a sub-niche: Daken diet, Atkins diet etc.

Are these subtopics you mention LSI keywords from the Google keywords tool?

A closer look at some of the most competitive markets and you'll see WHY and HOW silo structures do so well. It's not BS, it's not a "theory".

I mean, you don't have to believe it or discredit it - just look at Google rankings for foinkin sake...

Problem is: most people can't follow a silo structure when developing websites cause it can be tedious and a slow process - instead is faster/cooler to just drop new content with no idea whatsoever of using it to reinforce your previous content...

That's about it.

I'd love to use the silo structure but I must admit most people (myself included) just don't have the skills to jump into the code of a wordpress theme and modify it.

I've heard people mention themes such as Thesis or Clickbump that are close to a Silo structure.

Any other good wordpress themes people could recommend?

A lot of you people imagine/use the "silo" completely wrong, because you're so focused on maximizing SERP benefits that you completely ignore user experience. IF you really studied some of the top ranking sites out there, you'd know what I mean (hint: they don't use tight and closed silo structures - for a good reason).

Well its pure speculation but people may need to be careful that their silo structures don't look too "search engine only" rather than user friendly. It only takes a nice Google algo change and silos might be on the outer?

I've been thinking about how silos could be incorporated into my sites and what navigation my users would want to see to find out about the topic. Maybe start with the silo but "break the rules" if common sense calls for it and the user experience dictates it depending on what your site is about ...etc.

Besides... there are many people like me who just don't have the technical skills to modify a wordpress theme to be a true silo. Might have to go for something close to it but if it isn't perfect.... well Google is moving towards the human and the less perfect by the sounds of it so maybe this natural element to the site structure is not a bad thing?

Are you guys trippin or what? Silo structures ARE IN FACT user friendly. You get the best of both worlds using one.

Closed? What?

How can you close/tighten a Silo IF that thing is where you put your content? And who said anything about closing anything?

Shhessh.

Isn't SILO same as a well structured site? In that case SILO is certainly a good strategy for better SEO.

Can someone post or PM me a sample of a silo-ed site? I would learn better that way.

I still don't understand. Are you linking from the sub category to supporting pages or supporting pages to sub category? Or does this have nothing to do with linking but navigational structure?

What is silo? Always looking to try new things. Please explain.

Yukon,

Do you have to use an exact anchor text when linking to another page or phrase match will do the trick? Thanks in advance!

I guess I've been doing it backwards. Supporting pages linking back to Target page.

I suppose you can do that. Watch out for RSS feeds/links, etc... because they still might display the category page, I haven't tested the setup your talking about.

If your going to use an existing theme make sure to cleanup the rest of the page by removing unrelated links. I would look for a very simple theme to customize, it will make the cleanup easier.

Probably a stupid question, but when doing these silo structures do related posts plugins help or hurt? For instance the plugin I use relates pages by tags. I assume I can link all of the pages in my silo with a certain tag but wasn't sure if this was the most effective way.

Generally agree. For SEO alone, the silo approach is great. Often, it's just not that easy though. You may start working on a site that where the core business isn't as simple as one keyword, or your bosses don't want to make the site about one thing. I'd recommend auditing sites like that for frivolous content and try to get as much off as possible. If something doesn't relate directly to the core business, move that content off site or delete it.

Lol. This "silo" structure is nothing new. I used it on my first website that I made like 4-5 years ago.

Also it's the same sort of structure that's taught by SBI (Site Build It), which has been around for something like a decade now.

Good advice and an easy path to building an authority site in any niche.

I thought about the same thing but if I restructure the above Silo to this: what sub-pages could go under the "Baptist plan of salvation" and "Mormon plan of salvation" silo landing pages? I searched GKW and didn't see anything that could go under these Silo landing pages.

1- How To Become A Christian
--plan of salvation for children
--plan of salvation verses
--salvation prayer

2- Baptist Plan Of Salvation
-- ?

3- Mormon Plan of Salvation
-- ?

Silo Strukture certainly very good, thanks for the share.

How would I silo structure this site Ultrasound Technician on blogger.

I always wanted to try this but thought it wouldn't work because blogger has a no follow feature on it's category pages to prevent duplicate content.

Yukon,

What are your thoughts on outgoing links? I have read that outgoing links to other authority sites may help in the serps, but I also know by definition outgoing links introduce leakage.

Silo structure is important, but user responses are becoming the most important part of SEO: repeat visits, high click through rates, longer times on site. It might take some time for the results to show, but if your site is engaging it will climb the ranks.

as I experienced, using SILO does help maintain ranking, even post penguin attack

This is how I built my SILO. Notice how everything is tightly knit together, LOL?

I'm not sure I understand why Wordpress is not silo friendly. Isn't this as simple as creating parent pages for the silos and child pages underneath? What am I missing?

i dont understand at all lol

OK, long post coming up, but bear with me. Just been back and reread this thread - I have been applying a lot of these principles, but realise I have possibly been selling my sites short and I could do much more to implement a tighter silo structure. Thing is, as we all agree, Wordpress doesn't lend itself very well to this structure, the main problems being as follows:

- sidebar navigation that displays the ENTIRE site's navigation (waters down the silo structure, relatively easily fixed, though)
- difficulty in implementing the structure:

There are several ways you could go about it, each requiring hacking of Wordpress - what do people think?:

1) Create a hierarchy of pages:

Dogs (root topic)
Dog collars (level 1 category)
Blue dog collars (level 2 - if we want to go that deep)
Red dog collars etc...

ADVANTAGES: easy to implement out-of-the-box in WP; preserves a logical URL structure, i.e. dogs.com/collars/blue; you can relatively easily add widgets to link only to "sister pages" and back to the root page.
DISADVANTAGES: you lose all the advantages of "posts", and if you have an existing site based around category/post, like I do, it is a pig to have to convert all the posts to pages and make sure URL structure is preserved etc.
Any more disadvantages there that I have missed, or difficulties in implementing this, because this does seem like the easiest way to me?

2) Use a category/post structure:

This is probably what most of us have been doing, writing posts and filing them under categories.

ADVANTAGES: you can still use the "post" taxonomy - as we know, posts and pages are not actually that different really, but posts do have extra "dynamic" functionality, like being readily filed in date order, category, tags etc. (is that really a big deal though, you can do almost everything with pages?)
DISADVANTAGES: this approach has a LOT of problems - regular category pages are JUST a listing of POST TITLE + EXCERPT, which we tend to noindex anyway to avoid duplicate content problems. Also, category pages cannot have unique content on them, at least not without a plugin, so even if you eliminated the excerpt and only showed the list of post titles/links from the same category you would have to find a way to put the content for your "landing page" at the top of this list. A hack for this in WP would be quite complicated.

3) Use a hybrid page/category post structure.

This would have a PAGE as the main "landing page", the one we want to rank - we might have to hack WP so it can also belong to a category.

Then each landing page would list its support POSTS below with a widget/plugin that would display links to all posts from the same category, either automatically, if we gave the page a category, or manually, by specifying a category to pull a list of posts from.

On the supporting pages (posts), we would also have a similar plugin linking a list of posts from the same category.

ADVANTAGES: quite neatly does what we want;
DISADVANTAGES: takes some hacking; I THINK it messes up URL structure, since I don't think WP will let you have a page have the same URL slug as a category, i.e., if your main silo landing page is:

- dog collars (slug: dog-collars)

...you can't then also have posts in a category called (dog-collars) since this will create ambiguous URL paths (I am not sure about this though).

I am sure there are other variants of this that you could try.

So it seems to me that the "page" hierarchy approach is easiest to implement in WP? Or has anyone got any other implementations of this silo type of structure in WP that they care to share, that preferably reduce to a minimum the need for hacking (though I do know a bit about Wordpress and can make it do most things I want with a bit of coding).

^ I've done it using both categories and pages. It's really simple and requires very little "hacking". There's also no need for stupid stuff like "silo" themes or anything else "special".

I do link to the main "landing" pages from everywhere on the site, but that's just a personal preference and can be changed easily. I do it, because nearly 99% of authority websites in the niche I was going after do it (large PR6+ sites). You can change the menu type to not be "seen" by Google, but my opinion is that it's basically a big waste of time (note: opinion).

I'll make a full explanation later tonight, just finishing a huge project right now and feel like sharing something useful for a change.

Thanks, I will certainly appreciate that, I am pretty experienced with building sites and what-not but I feel like there's a bit of the puzzle missing there for me.

Basically, most premium themes allow you to add any content you want to category pages. Or you can edit one of the WP files and assign them appropriately. Or get a special theme (like yukon is working on) that does it for you. From my experience, every single premium theme I used had this functionality built in already, it's right under your category options.

yukon, how long until your theme is ready? I'd love to try it out.

I like the sound of a theme that can handle all that - I can set something up myself but I don't really want to be doing any more WP coding than I have got on my plate already, so that's definitely something I would be willing to pay for.

Only thing that concerns me with handling it within the theme is that you then have to live with the other design aspects of the theme. It's why I never went with Thesis - it doesn't QUITE do what I want on the front page (I prefer a "portal" type home page) and I don't want to have to start making my own changes to that, not after paying $xxx for the Developer option, and especially not to make changes to core theme or WP files that I have to then migrate when a new udpate/version of WP or the theme come along.

I sort of reckoned on coding this functionality as a plugin, i.e. WP hooks, filters and post meta settings (avoiding changes to the database too, if poss), but as I say, I really don't want to be writing any new plugins, so I'd rather just go with whatever is available.

I have a site that got a bit of a Penguin slap a week or two ago (probably some crappy backlinking coming back to haunt me, or a blog network getting deindexed), so that would be a candidate to take to pieces and create some sort of silo-like structure to come up with a decent solution in WP (pending Yukon's ).

^ yea that's the main reason I never bought any of those MFA themes (CTRtheme, clickbump something..?). I build high quality websites (subjective) and I'm really picky about the design options and all that stuff. A custom header and a background/sidebar color setting just won't do, lol.

This is also why I've been using Genesis over thesis a lot lately. My latest project is about 200 pages right now and growing. The site looks AWESOME, I love it! Obviously most of the structure I had to customize myself, but that's not a problem tbh.

Thanks for those tips - Prose looks like little more than the basic framework theme to me..?

Oh yes, I could probably go with that Copyblogger approach as a simple fix. With that approach, though, your URL structure does not really reflect the silo structure you want to achieve, because you will have like:

mysite.com/cornerstone-page-on-dog-collars, linking down to:
mysite.com/category/collars/blue
mysite.com/category/collars/red

Which is obviously not very neat. Wonder if it really matters that much - I have always assumed it does...

In any case you can achieve this really easily by using a plugin like WordPress › List category posts « WordPress Plugins to simply list the posts from the category you want, wherever you want - it's not automated, and far from a perfect silo, but it's a quick fix.

ROFL - I just went through a couple of sites of mine that could be performing better, one having taken a knock in a recent update, and one that lost a fair bit of long-tail traffic in a recent Panda.

And they are absolute DISASTERS in terms of their structure! I couldn't believe what I was seeing - I have got so sloppy in my old age, it's a wonder they are ranking for anything! Flat URL structure, no interlinking with supporting pages, all KINDS of nasties. Just fixed both sites with a MUCH better structure, something more like a proper silo structure, all using free plugins.

One of them I have basically totally changed the URL structure, so a ton of inner pages will show 404s for a while - I just don't care, it's too much hassle to set up individual 301 redirects to every single page (no simple way to do a wildcard redirect), and anyway, they have been ranking poorly for a while, Google will sort it out, I've done it before, it'll just take a week or two to fix itself, no worries.

Quite interested to see the results, especially on the Penguinized site, and it would be nice to see some of that medium-to-long-tail traffic return on the other one.

Yukon thanks for taking the time to explain Silo Structure as it's certainty something I need to implement in my new sites. Couple questions though.

1. Do you know when your new theme might be released?
2. Do you know of any example sites (preferably smaller size) that use Silo?

Thanks!

I have a blog but then I think the stuff I am talking about are kind of hard to silo because they are not common search terms, and I also have a few different topics there as well.. for example if I am talking about WEB DESIGN as main subject.. right.. then in the blog I also talk about computers, hardwares, audio, photography.. what the heck do I do? um.. split the blog?

Scott, thanks for the explanation, I might be tempted by Clickbump yet Sounds like you have put a lot of work into that aspect - I notice that all the themes that allow unique content on category pages do not provide so much as a WYSIWIG editor, you have to just paste in the HTML from elsewhere, which is pretty cheesy... Good work!

Umm, make sense! Silo structure can keep overall site to some niche topic which Google can judge easily what the site is about.

My advice to everyone is know what your buying, before you buy.

Do your own research & separate pitch from product.

It might just be me but it seems like if you have a real blog with interesting content and you are adding content to it, it's only natural to create categories, subcategories, menus, and internal links.

I have seen the same result from my experience. It seems Google is paying more and more attention to the "SILO" a.k.a "LSI Keywords"

You can do this not only for your category, but for your content as well. When you add more LSI keywords into it, it has a higher chance of ranking higher.

According to me It's defiantly not the only way to rank a page, but it does help lighten the external backlink workload.

^ probably not, though I don't use that structure (I think it was only an example though?). My sites are more like:

eye health -> contact lenses -> contact lenses for dry eyes || types of contact lenses || some other title

Basically, some of the URL's might contain the same word on all three levels, but most don't.

Woah, wait up.

Firstly, someone having 500 posts on a forum does NOT them an expert make ! I think this forum is proof enough of that :-D.

Second, your site looks fine to me, at first glance I have no idea what this "expert” is talking about, you just have a bunch of useful tools on there, with an almost flat structure, what is there for Google not to "like"?!

^^I wouldn't worry about over optimization, as long as you have plenty of valuable content. Basically, as long as it looks natural, you're probably good. I link my pages together using titles as anchors (and strip stop words from the URL's).

I am trying not to call them 'silos' anymore as it then takes another day to explain to the client. From a user perspective it it the logical thing to do and so I have simply adopted it as a best practice and make a habit of starting there with every new client.

I never used this strategy.

This strategy still works great even after the updates. Thanks for sharing this!

The silo format is also great for ranking local location since you cannot jam all that info on one page.

Yukon:

I am trying to use the Categories in Wordpress for the silo but it comes up as "category archive" does this matter?

Also, I am using Smartlinks to use words as anchor text and that runs through most of the articles. I am wondering if this would screw up the effectiveness of the silos?

Never used this and my clients rank for some of the toughest keywords imaginable...

Not saying it doesn't work, but what I do seems to work just fine without it

Interesting, hmm.

I always preach that SEO is kind of like a blind dude shooting darts. If you're an expert, you'll be fine.

But if someone moves the dart board, or you get pushed, you might be screwed.

This is a good technique nevertheless