Silo Architecture for Large Authority Sites

I don't see a problem with having 195 links as long as you don't display them all there at once. Give your users a navigation system which journeys them through to the right link. For example breaking down into continents then countries (they pick a continent, which then shows the countries in the continent), or give them an alphabetical system that shows only the countries beginning with the letter they picked. This can be easily done with js/jquery.

Instead of this, you can have nested silos like news sites but you'll still have to group your countries. The only difference would be that instead of having a menu all on one page, you have an extra layer of pages.

Maybe Yukon will pop in and give some advice. Just off the top of my head.. why not add another level and have your top navigation based around continents?

I had been thinking about doing it alphabetically.

So just below the header would be a list A > Z which would be displayed with javascript. Hovering would bring up all countries beginning with that letter. A

The problem with that is most js menus function terribly on mobile imo. Especially when each link is only 1em large. And there are 26 of them in close proximity...I'm sure there's a work around but its probably to complex for me.


The other option I was considering (as mrdomains pointed out) is adding another level in the hierarchy, like the larger Yed image that Yukon made in one of the main silo threads. For example I could add a hierarchy that sorted by continent. And link the country keywords to that instead.

The problem with that is I am forcing users to make an additional click, increasing the URL length, and end up diluting PR from the homepage...ie. it no longer passes directly from the homepage to the keyword pages it now has to go through an additional tier.

The continent example has a similar issue as my actual niche in that Europe and Africa have a ton of countries...and the rest have almost none. In my niche some 'categories' would have 50+ and some less than 5

I would put all those country internal links on the Index page.

The Index page is the main page, let traffic make their country selection, then that country link anchor-text will take them to the Canada page (example), the Canada page will take traffic to the Canada supporting pages. IMO that's about as simple as you can get.

You don't want traffic to have to keep clicking deep into the site just to get to the content, it just gets confusing. Google also crawls sites in small batches of links/URLs, they don't crawl an entire site at one time, so I would keep the URL as compact as possible & not nest too deep.

(Good example IMO)
Google will know the Index page is a list of countries & that the Canada link on the Index page is stressing the importance of Canada as a keyword, on the actual Canada page start promoting the Canada + diamond keywords, do the same on the Canada supporting pages.

Craigslist is a bare bones example of listing country/states, that page has 511 sub-domain links. Just saying I wouldn't worry too much about having 197 internal links on one page If it makes sense (I think it makes sense in your case).