Silo Architecture and Mobile First
-
This goes to the age-old SEO argument - how many links in the navigation.
- We are a well-known brick and mortar brand
- We have 20,000 SKUs and over 500 categories and sub-catetgories.
- 95%+ of our backlinks go to the home page. We don't have a blog, but it's in the works.
- Our site is not responsive. It serves up different versions based on device type, but is not an "M Dot".
- Our rankings are pretty strong in spite of a large number of technical SEO issues (different discussion).
Currently, our e-commerce desktop site is "Siloed" (I'm new to the company - I didn't do it). The home page links via the top nav to categories. The category pages link to subcategories via sidebar navigation, or via images on the category pages (instead of product images). It's pretty close to textbook silos, and it's very near how I would have designed it.
This silo architecture passes the most link juice to our categories which target our highest search volume (head) terms. The categories pass link juice (albeit significantly less) to our subcats which target secondary terms. In terms of search volume and commercial value, our tiers line up very neatly. On average, the targeted subcat terms get about 1/6 of the volume of our head terms.
The Silo concept has been around forever, and is evangelized by Bruce Clay and other respected SEOs. Every time I've siloed an ecommerce site, the rankings improve dramatically, so who am I to argue?
So, what's the problem? Read on...
Our mobile navigation, on the other hand, links to every category and subcategory via flyout navigation (I didn't do this, either). In theory, this distributes an equal amount of link juice to all categories and subcategories. It robs link juice from our categories and passes it to subcategories.
Right now, this isn't a problem. Rankings are based on the desktop site, and minor adjustments are made for mobile rankings.
When Mobile First rolls out, our mobile nav will be the default navigation for Google, and in theory, link juice distribution across the site will change radically, and potentially harm our rankings for our head terms.
I always study site architecture for a number of respected ecommerce sites. Target and Walmart, for example, link to every category and subcategory through their mobile and desktop navigation. Wayfair takes a silo approach on mobile and desktop, linking in tiers.
I would argue that Walmart and Target have so much DA/TF/CF that they don't give a damn about targeted link juice distribution - it's all about UX. Wayfair's backlink profile is strong, but it's not Walmart or Target, so they need to be concerned about link juice distribution - hence the silo approach.
Have the Google spokespeople said anything about this? I see this as a potential landmine across the industry. Is this something I should be concerned about? Has anyone had any experience with de-siloing a website? Am I making a big deal out of a non-issue?
Please - no arguments about usability. UX is absolutely part of the equation. Usability is a ranking factor, but if our rankings and traffic take a nose dive, UX isn't going to matter.
This is a theoretical discussion discussion on link juice distribution, and I know that compromises need to be made between SEO and UX.
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
-
M.ExampleSite vs mobile.ExampleSite vs ExampleSite.com
Hi, I have a call with a potential client tomorrow where all I know is that they are wigged-out about canonicalization, indexing and architecture for their three sites: m.ExampleSite.com mobile.ExampleSite.com ExampleSite.com The sites are pretty large... 350k for the mobiles and 5 million for the main site. They're a retailer with endless products. They're main site is not mobile-responsive, which is evidently why they have the m and mobile sites. Why two, I don't know. This is how they currently hand this: What would you suggest they do about this? The most comprehensive fix would be making the main site mobile responsive and 301 the old mobile sub domains to the main site. That's probably too much work for them. So, what more would you suggest and why? Your thoughts? Best... Mike P.S., Beneath my hand-drawn portrait avatar above it says "Staff" at this moment, which I am not. Some kind of bug I guess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Google Signal for Site Speed: PageSpeed ranking, Time To First Byte, or something else?
We were having an internal discussion regarding what specific signal Google is looking for regarding Site Speed. My understanding was that Google primarily used Time To First Byte (TTFB) as its signal of Site Speed. My colleague argued that this is not part of Google's PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and therefore was unlikely to be the primary signal. Who is right? Is TTFB the primary signal or the score on PageSpeed Insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DesignHammer1 -
Responsive design (Showing diffrent pages(icons) for Mobile/Tablet users)
I'm writing this question just to insure that we are implementing the responsive design correctly.Example of pages: http://www.yamsafer.me/en/united-arab-emirates/abu-dhabi/hotel/beach-rotana-abu-dhabiAnother : http://www.yamsafer.me/enCan we show different pages(Enhanced for mobile users) to mobile/Tablets visitors (sure same content) but with new icons that enhance the User experience for mobile/tablet users , while hiding these items to PC, laptop users?.Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yamsafer.com0 -
Silo This! Siloing issue with KW targets and multiple categories
I am having a difficult time determining how to silo the content for this website (douwnpour). The issue I am having is that as I see it there are several different top-level keyword targets to put at the top of the silos, however due to the nature of the products they fit in almost every one of the top-level categories. For instance our main keyword term is "Audio Books" (and derivatives thereof). but we also want to target "Audiobook Downloads" and "Books on CD". Due to the nature of the products, almost every product would fit in all 3 categories. It gets even worse when you consider normal book taxonomy. The normal breakdown would be from audiobooks>Fiction(or Nonfiction). Now each product also belongs to one of these categories, as well as "download", "CD", and "Audiobook". And still worse, our navigation menus link every page on the site back to all of these categories (except audiobooks, as we don't really have a landing page for that besides the home page, which is lacking in optimized content, but is linked from every page on the site.) So, I am finding siloing, or developing a cross-linking plan that makes sense very difficult. It's much easier at the lower levels, but at the top things become muddy. Throw in the idea that we may eventually get e-books as well, and it gets even muddier. I have some ideas of how to deal with some of this, such as having the site navigation put in an i frame, instituting basic breadcrumbs, and building landing pages, but I'm open to any advice or ideas that might help, especially with the top level taxonomy structure. TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DownPour0 -
How can I resolve weird duplicates showing up because of my mobile website?
We launched a mobile site a month ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL: m.example.com The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I am trying to resolve right now by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. So what is weird is that I found urls that were detected as duplicates on top of the regular duplicate: www.example.com/name?device=desktop m.example.com/name?device=mobile These 2 urls double the number of duplicates. Can you tell me what are these? is this normal? and how can I fix those? Thank you mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Anyone Knows a good plugin for WP that will deal with the mobile visitors?
I see traffic coming to my sites from mobile devices and I wanted to make sure they get the best experience on my sites but I don't want to create another version of the site on the same domain as this will cause a serious INNER duplicate content issue. Anyone know a good WP plugin that solves this issue with out creating inner duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dan5550 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0