Do I understand Silos correctly?
-
Hi everyone,
Rob Cairns brought me onto the concept of silos.
I'm very amazed of the concept and want to make sure that I get it right.
When I create silos I sort subjects according to their main keyword which will rank most difficult and make this the main landing page (the main menu entry within a menu navigation).
Then I create submenuentries that have the main menu entry as parent and that also have (in wordpress) the landing page (which is the main menu entry) as a parent site.
I use these subpages for LSI and long tail KWs.
I do not link between silo subpages of different categories. There is (naturally) a link from the main menu entry to the sub menu entries (which is a little weaker) and a link back to the main menu entry (the landing page) from within the text (which is a little stronger).
I also can link between subpages of the same silo or from subpages to a landing page of a different silo if the keyword fits to that landing page.
Is that correct so far?
Cheers
Marc
-
Hi Martijn,
thank you very much. Now I am absolutely confident to build my own silo
As far as I understood it is only ok to link to the main landing page of other silos ... not to the silo subpages. And you should not overdo it... for whatever that means...
Thank you very much.
-
Hi Marc,
You're definitely getting the idea of silos. I'm not sure though if you should or should not be linking to other silos. In some cases it can be benefitial as the silos could be relevant to each other as well. This used to be the case for a site I used to work on and still in some cases I can see a lot of potential in interlinking certain channels together.
Martijn.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are my language tags correct?
Hello, I have a Spanish website for Spanish speaking people es.example.com. I also have example.com for all English speaking people across the world. I want that users who go to google.es and search in English get our example.com site and others who search in Spanish on google.es get the Spanish site. Should the tags be like this: Or should we also have this tag aswell to specify? Otherwise we might only show the es.domain even for english queris? :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Correct Internal Linking Flow / Keyword Cannibalization
Hi, Would like some advice re our internal linking structure and possible keyword self cannibalization on our ecommerce site.. Will try and give you an overview. Imagine this page structure: Site
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
Brand 1
Brand 2
Brand 2 Shoes
Products
Brand 2 Sweaters Then say in Brand 2 Shoes page we have the shoes, e.g., the products labeled as Brand 2 Shoes "Name of Model"
Brand 2 Shoes "Name of Model" Now, what I'm worried about is that if I do a search for "Brand 2 Shoes" it should bring up my landing page right? But it doesn't, it brings up some of the products instead... I'm worried that we may be self cannibalizing some of the keywords - and thinking of changing the product page to be "Brand Name of Model Shoes" or "Name of Model Shoes by Brand" Any ideas or comments appreciated! Thanks all0 -
How long does internationlisation take to be indexed correctly
Hi guys I have had a UK site that has been indexed in Google for some time. Recently we started targeting Ireland and so I created a folder to do this (domain.com/ireland/) As well as adding an /irland/ folder I created a hreflang sitemap and in Webmaster Tools I specified that .com/ireland/ targets Ireland and .com targets UK. However this was all two weeks ago and Im still not seeing the Irish pages start ranking in Google.ie and was hoping one of you guys would be able to help me out? How long should it take for these pages to start appearing in the relevant country specific search engine? Deepcrawl states that the Hreflang is correct as well so Im just a bit worried that Ive missed something glaringly obvious! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Webmaster Tools - Structured Data 100% drop. Many people with same issue, nobody seems to understand what might have caused it.
WMT shows a significant drop in structured data markup on June 7th, steep incline by June 21st. Now the same thing happened on August 9th, with no signs of recovery. Lost 45% of our search traffic. There are many people with the same problem, and nobody seems to know what caused it. Here are a few links to some forums: #1 Google Groups, #2 Google Groups, #3 Google Groups, #4 70% drop on GWT on June 7 Google SEO News and Discussion forum at WebmasterWorld. On our end we see a 100% drop in breadcrumbs and a 100% drop in hcards leading to a 45% search traffic drop. Any ideas why might have happened and how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PhilippGreitsch0 -
Silo Architecture - need an expert's advice
I understand the concept of silo architecture. What I don't understand is how to build the site navigation. I see experts talking about silos, but their sites have pervasive top level navigation. In theory, your top level nav breaks your silos. If I have 20 pages of supporting content all linked to my silo page, and the top nav is on the supporting content pages, then those pages all link to the pages in the top nav - silo broken, and link juice diluted. it would seem to me that the only way to build a true silo is to strip out all of the navigation on a supporting page, and only have it link to: 1. The silo landing page 2. Other supporting pages in the silo. is this what Bruce Clay does? I've seen Rand's lectures on silos as well. Is this what he is doing? I recently saw a video by the Network Empire team, and they'd also have a pervasive nav. Can someone please explain this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Are Silos Still Important for SEO?
I am in the process of migrating www.nyc-officespace-leader.com from Drupal to Wordpress and my developer is of the opinion that it is not necessary to implement silos to achieve favorable ranking for competitive keywords. I know a lot has changed in the last two years with Panda and Penguin. Is it SEO best practices to implement silos in the course of the redesign? Will this make a significant difference for SEO? Thanks, Alan Rosinsky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Trying to understand why it happened
Hi there, Quite a lot of my keywords that were on page 1 for quite some time have just been pushed below page 5 on Monday 04/06/12 all at the same time, however some are still on page 1 maybe dropping a rank or two. The link building for these keywords have been pretty much the same, using blogs, product reviews etc. As a precaution I ask bloggers to take a lot of my links off as they were site-wide and keep them on homepage only, is this what has had the negative affect? please note Some of the keywords that were on page 1 and now page 5 were not part of the site-wide activity. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780