[GUIDE] Reverse Squared Virtual Silos - New Technique

[4440]

Koray is a scammer who doesn't know much about SEO.

I could do a complete exposé on him, but it's not worth the time.

His ideas are actually complete nonsense. He says for example :-

If you want to rank for "germany visas"

He says you build topical authority by creating content on everything about germany, like culture, history, locations and so on, then you "bridge" the topics together and that magically gets you topical authority in visas.

It's complete and utter nonsense.

I could take you through every one of his so called "success stories" and show you the nonsense. It's all fake, but it looks wonderful if you look at the traffic stats.

It's like these guys that DR pump their blogs and sell guest posts on "high DR blogs".

Just take a look at his main site: holisticaldigital.seo

Wow, 86.3k traffic. Looks amazing, right.

Even more than diggitymarketing.com which only has 60.8k

I mean just look at it

View attachment 281309


Wow.. The man must be some sort of SEO guru.

Let's give him our money to learn how to do this, right?

haha..

Let's take a closer look ;-)

First, you'll see his killer strategy in action, of "topical bridging".

Here's one of his articles - https://www.holisticseo.digital/theoretical-seo/content-writing/confused-words/learnt-vs-learned

If you scroll down to the bottom you'll see this "topical bridging"

He has H2's like

View attachment 281310

You see the magic? So he's connecting this to "content writers", hence content marketing.

https://www.holisticseo.digital/seo-research-study/topical-map
Here, you can see him talk about it. Sorry I got his term wrong. It's "contextual bridging". Sounds better though doesn't it?

View attachment 281311

But wait..

We also have, lexical relations, lexicosemantics for SEO, information responsiveness, cost-of-retrieval, source context AND contextual bridges. Phew. Advanced stuff.

The mere mortals can only hope to one day understand this advanced awesomeness.

Surely he must be ranking for some absolutely killer SEO keywords with all this contextual bridging, super responsive information technical techniquery. Wow. I'm getting the hang of this!

Let's see what he ranks for.

View attachment 281312

Wait.. what?

best regards means? What flag is that?

ps meaning in chat? In India.

learnt vs learned in the US.

"surprize"

"especially or speciallly"

"lul meaning"

"idk stand for" in Brazil.

Hm.. Where's the SEO keywords?

Surely this isn't just one of those spam-blogs that the guest post scammers like to build up by ranking for all these weird low comp keywords?

Let's list all the keywords that have 'seo' in them that he ranks for..








View attachment 281313

Oh look at that. "Total traffic: 947". So he has 947 traffic from keywords with "seo" in them. And his own brand in Turkey "holistic seo" has 300 searches. In the US it has 200. So over half of those are his site brand.

Well well well.

He can't even rank top 3 for "semantic seo" his core main keyword. Yet he wants you all to believe he's the king of SEO that can rank all your money sites.

And bear in mind his site is a monster. It's DR 48 with 1k RDs.

He has links from

Homepage link from seobythesea.com
ahrefs.com/blog/topical-authority
moz.com
searchenginejournal.com
seoroundtable.com
link-assistant.com
uxmatters.com
nealschaffer.com
sitechecker.pro
subkit.com
oncrawl.com
lumar.io
thetitl.com
sitebulb.com
ipullrank.com

All those are highly relevant, DR70+ industry sites.

Yet.. He still can't rank?

#12 for "seo theory" lol.

He has a page dedicated to that.

He's getting beaten by twitter.com/seo_theory?lang=en

And a dr 14 on page 1.

"seo brighton" rank 18 with a page dedicated to it.

Keyword difficulty on ahrefs? (not that it means much, but..) ONE. Yes, 1.

linkedin and instagram beat him here.

And uh, ti.to

Oh, and twitter and youtube.


He literally ranks for almost nothing. His own site. His oldest site. One that has the kind of SEO industry backlinks most SEO's only dream of.

But.. If you pay $997 for his course, you'll learn how to rank sites with no backlinks. Only using the power of contextual bridging and lexicosemantics.

Well, sort of. Once you sign up, you'll find out you have to pay $5k for his private lessons to get the "real stuff". Oh well.

Now, the thing about SEO is it's hard to call people out on bullshit terms because it's highly subjective.

"lexicosemantics" for example IS a "thing". And it's "sort of" related to SEO. So he can get away with that crap.

Although, if you understand modern search you'll see through that BS.

Lexicosemantics is the study of word meanings.

What the fuck has that got to do with Google?

Their aglorithm doesn't "study word meanings". Even when they were using BERT back in 2020 this would be meaningless. Transformer models don't study word meanings. They have nothing to do with "word meanings".

His nonsense about "lexical relations" is more likely to apply to search engines in the 2000's and early 2010's.


Machine learning has nothing to do with lexical relations or linguistics. It just understands context, meaning, connections, relations, sentinment, intention behind sentences and paragraphs.

Does he understand machine learning?

View attachment 281318

Well, I got this popup on his site. So he certainly claims to! Advanced SEO and AI!

He is a VERY strong marketer. He's the andrew tate of the SEO world. He knows how to shake things up. "Change Culture in SEO" LOL.

Let's take a look at one of his AI articles. Now we're in a realm of exact science, so you can't get away with BS.

Here's an article on BERT - https://www.holisticseo.digital/python-seo/summarize/

2nd paragraph :-

View attachment 281327


First he says "BERT sentence embeddings".

This is bullshit. Why?

sentence embeddings have nothing to do with BERT. Sentence embeddings are something you can create with many machine learning models, and we use it for vector search.

The BERT transformer machine learning model creates a word embedding matrix. Not sentence embeddings.

Ok, you can forgive him on that. It's pretty fucking advanced. Not many people are going to catch that one since almost no one understands transformer architecture.

But let's continue

"provide an extractive summarize method via the TextRank model and Lead3".

Say what now?

It doesn't provide any method.

But what? TextRank? VIA TextRank no less. So he's saying BERT works via TextRank?

View attachment 281326

View attachment 281324

Word embeddings you say gpt4? I didn't ask, but nice of you to confirm what I mentioned above.

There's your SEO and AI expert, folks.

Do I even need to go on?

BERT also uses Lead3 does it?


Do I even need to bother telling you that Lead-3 has nothing to do with anything? It's just some random term he's picked out his ass and made a big fancy sounding sentence to dupe you.

I love the bit where he says "BERT is used to understand human languages via RNN, attention mechanisms and transformers".

RNN stands for recurrent neural network and it's an ancient neural network architecture.

Attention mechanisms are part of transformers.

Transformers are the modern neural network architecture we use in all LLMs today.


Then he says "BERT is used for understanding an article's internal structure".

No, it's not. BERT doesn't understand structure like that. It's used to understand sentence meaning and sentence relation. It's trained using 2 methods. One is to remove words and have it guess the missing word. The other is with sentence pairs, AB, where it needs to determine of B comes after A. Hence the first is meaning, the second is relation. Nothing to do with internal article structure.


But this guy is beloved by many as being the almight SEO guru of the decade. That in its self should ilmuminate the true knowledge level of the broader SEO community and agency world.

I couldn't help myself here. Being compared to Koray really isn't something I'd like.

I agree most of Koray's traffic is highly unrelated to SEO.

I've been following him from the beginning of the concept of semantic SEO cause he is one of the few SEOs who focus on and share such stuff.

Even from the beginning, his posts merely rank for SEO keywords, I remember 2 years ago his main traffic was a post talking about JPG image and merely ranks for SEO keywords.

His writing style, or his content strategy looks exactly like it is now, it does not change. Long-ASS repeated posts.

But I do have learned a lot of the semantic SEO concepts from his early blogs. Well, most of them are just concepts.

Like other SEOs, he does not share(either he doesn't want to or does not know how) the exact how-tos but broad concepts, things like "what triggers reranking" or "one has to do A to get B"

I figured out the exact techniques all by myself. But his posts do share very inspiring stuff.

I remember I spent the whole night drinking beer while "studying" his long-ass blogs when semantic SEO, NLP were a hype.

Good old days reading his posts and the Great Bill Slawski for all the technical stuff.

I think the real catch is: his SEO techniques definitely get traffic. How could long-ass content not get traffic? But can you rank in competitive niches? I have not seen a proof yet.

 

[splishsplash]

I agree most of Koray's traffic is highly unrelated to SEO.

I've been following him from the beginning of the concept of semantic SEO cause he is one of the few SEOs who focus on and share such stuff.

Even from the beginning, his posts merely rank for SEO keywords, I remember 2 years ago his main traffic was a post talking about JPG image and merely ranks for SEO keywords.

His writing style, or his content strategy looks exactly like it is now, it does not change. Long-ASS repeated posts.

But I do have learned a lot of the semantic SEO concepts from his early blogs. Well, most of them are just concepts.

Like other SEOs, he does not share(either he doesn't want to or does not know how) the exact how-tos but broad concepts, things like "what triggers reranking" or "one has to do A to get B"

I figured out the exact techniques all by myself. But his posts do share very inspiring stuff.

I remember I spent the whole night drinking beer while "studying" his long-ass blogs when semantic SEO, NLP were a hype.

Good old days reading his posts and the Great Bill Slawski for all the technical stuff.

I think the real catch is: his SEO techniques definitely get traffic. How could long-ass content not get traffic? But can you rank in competitive niches? I have not seen a proof yet.

Hehe, yes exactly. He doesn't know the "how". The problem too is if he tries to teach a "how", then he can't sell you a $997 course followed by a $5k private coaching.

I teach the how because the how isn't that hard. A few threads on bhw and the job's done.

and if you follow my advice you will actually rank for your hard keywords in your niche.

 

[Yasseeoo]

Koray is a scammer who doesn't know much about SEO.

I could do a complete exposé on him, but it's not worth the time.

His ideas are actually complete nonsense. He says for example :-

If you want to rank for "germany visas"

He says you build topical authority by creating content on everything about germany, like culture, history, locations and so on, then you "bridge" the topics together and that magically gets you topical authority in visas.

It's complete and utter nonsense.

I could take you through every one of his so called "success stories" and show you the nonsense. It's all fake, but it looks wonderful if you look at the traffic stats.

It's like these guys that DR pump their blogs and sell guest posts on "high DR blogs".

Just take a look at his main site: holisticaldigital.seo

Wow, 86.3k traffic. Looks amazing, right.

Even more than diggitymarketing.com which only has 60.8k

I mean just look at it

View attachment 281309


Wow.. The man must be some sort of SEO guru.

Let's give him our money to learn how to do this, right?

haha..

Let's take a closer look ;-)

First, you'll see his killer strategy in action, of "topical bridging".

Here's one of his articles - https://www.holisticseo.digital/theoretical-seo/content-writing/confused-words/learnt-vs-learned

If you scroll down to the bottom you'll see this "topical bridging"

He has H2's like

View attachment 281310

You see the magic? So he's connecting this to "content writers", hence content marketing.

https://www.holisticseo.digital/seo-research-study/topical-map
Here, you can see him talk about it. Sorry I got his term wrong. It's "contextual bridging". Sounds better though doesn't it?

View attachment 281311

But wait..

We also have, lexical relations, lexicosemantics for SEO, information responsiveness, cost-of-retrieval, source context AND contextual bridges. Phew. Advanced stuff.

The mere mortals can only hope to one day understand this advanced awesomeness.

Surely he must be ranking for some absolutely killer SEO keywords with all this contextual bridging, super responsive information technical techniquery. Wow. I'm getting the hang of this!

Let's see what he ranks for.

View attachment 281312

Wait.. what?

best regards means? What flag is that?

ps meaning in chat? In India.

learnt vs learned in the US.

"surprize"

"especially or speciallly"

"lul meaning"

"idk stand for" in Brazil.

Hm.. Where's the SEO keywords?

Surely this isn't just one of those spam-blogs that the guest post scammers like to build up by ranking for all these weird low comp keywords?

Let's list all the keywords that have 'seo' in them that he ranks for..








View attachment 281313

Oh look at that. "Total traffic: 947". So he has 947 traffic from keywords with "seo" in them. And his own brand in Turkey "holistic seo" has 300 searches. In the US it has 200. So over half of those are his site brand.

Well well well.

He can't even rank top 3 for "semantic seo" his core main keyword. Yet he wants you all to believe he's the king of SEO that can rank all your money sites.

And bear in mind his site is a monster. It's DR 48 with 1k RDs.

He has links from

Homepage link from seobythesea.com
ahrefs.com/blog/topical-authority
moz.com
searchenginejournal.com
seoroundtable.com
link-assistant.com
uxmatters.com
nealschaffer.com
sitechecker.pro
subkit.com
oncrawl.com
lumar.io
thetitl.com
sitebulb.com
ipullrank.com

All those are highly relevant, DR70+ industry sites.

Yet.. He still can't rank?

#12 for "seo theory" lol.

He has a page dedicated to that.

He's getting beaten by twitter.com/seo_theory?lang=en

And a dr 14 on page 1.

"seo brighton" rank 18 with a page dedicated to it.

Keyword difficulty on ahrefs? (not that it means much, but..) ONE. Yes, 1.

linkedin and instagram beat him here.

And uh, ti.to

Oh, and twitter and youtube.


He literally ranks for almost nothing. His own site. His oldest site. One that has the kind of SEO industry backlinks most SEO's only dream of.

But.. If you pay $997 for his course, you'll learn how to rank sites with no backlinks. Only using the power of contextual bridging and lexicosemantics.

Well, sort of. Once you sign up, you'll find out you have to pay $5k for his private lessons to get the "real stuff". Oh well.

Now, the thing about SEO is it's hard to call people out on bullshit terms because it's highly subjective.

"lexicosemantics" for example IS a "thing". And it's "sort of" related to SEO. So he can get away with that crap.

Although, if you understand modern search you'll see through that BS.

Lexicosemantics is the study of word meanings.

What the fuck has that got to do with Google?

Their aglorithm doesn't "study word meanings". Even when they were using BERT back in 2020 this would be meaningless. Transformer models don't study word meanings. They have nothing to do with "word meanings".

His nonsense about "lexical relations" is more likely to apply to search engines in the 2000's and early 2010's.


Machine learning has nothing to do with lexical relations or linguistics. It just understands context, meaning, connections, relations, sentinment, intention behind sentences and paragraphs.

Does he understand machine learning?

View attachment 281318

Well, I got this popup on his site. So he certainly claims to! Advanced SEO and AI!

He is a VERY strong marketer. He's the andrew tate of the SEO world. He knows how to shake things up. "Change Culture in SEO" LOL.

Let's take a look at one of his AI articles. Now we're in a realm of exact science, so you can't get away with BS.

Here's an article on BERT - https://www.holisticseo.digital/python-seo/summarize/

2nd paragraph :-

View attachment 281327


First he says "BERT sentence embeddings".

This is bullshit. Why?

sentence embeddings have nothing to do with BERT. Sentence embeddings are something you can create with many machine learning models, and we use it for vector search.

The BERT transformer machine learning model creates a word embedding matrix. Not sentence embeddings.

Ok, you can forgive him on that. It's pretty fucking advanced. Not many people are going to catch that one since almost no one understands transformer architecture.

But let's continue

"provide an extractive summarize method via the TextRank model and Lead3".

Say what now?

It doesn't provide any method.

But what? TextRank? VIA TextRank no less. So he's saying BERT works via TextRank?

View attachment 281326

View attachment 281324

Word embeddings you say gpt4? I didn't ask, but nice of you to confirm what I mentioned above.

There's your SEO and AI expert, folks.

Do I even need to go on?

BERT also uses Lead3 does it?


Do I even need to bother telling you that Lead-3 has nothing to do with anything? It's just some random term he's picked out his ass and made a big fancy sounding sentence to dupe you.

I love the bit where he says "BERT is used to understand human languages via RNN, attention mechanisms and transformers".

RNN stands for recurrent neural network and it's an ancient neural network architecture.

Attention mechanisms are part of transformers.

Transformers are the modern neural network architecture we use in all LLMs today.


Then he says "BERT is used for understanding an article's internal structure".

No, it's not. BERT doesn't understand structure like that. It's used to understand sentence meaning and sentence relation. It's trained using 2 methods. One is to remove words and have it guess the missing word. The other is with sentence pairs, AB, where it needs to determine of B comes after A. Hence the first is meaning, the second is relation. Nothing to do with internal article structure.


But this guy is beloved by many as being the almight SEO guru of the decade. That in its self should ilmuminate the true knowledge level of the broader SEO community and agency world.

I couldn't help myself here. Being compared to Koray really isn't something I'd like.

Damn Bro you are god and have shown me light!!
Koray goes on all these stuff and babbles and no one seems to understand him. He is doing that to mask the scam it seems. Thanks man

 

[splishsplash]

Damn Bro you are god and have shown me light!!
Koray goes on all these stuff and babbles and no one seems to understand him. He is doing that to mask the scam it seems. Thanks man

Well, what he does is come out with the classic "You're not smart enough to understand". Anyone who questions him gets told they're not smart enough. It's like a brainwashing cult. I would see people regularly on the group question themselves, but then say "I don't understand any of this, but I know if I keep studying I will.. I just need to work harder". In his course he kept telling people to "study harder".

I questioned him, and he banned me from the course/group. I didn't even manage a chargeback, so I lost the $997.

Another guy I knew on the course also questioned him, and he unleashed fury on him. He has Narcissist personality disorder. I don't say that lightly, but he shows all the symptoms. He feeds off the community. Anyone who questions him he really turns vile on them.

He had a falling out with a staff member, and he set out to destroy his staff member. Told her he'd make sure she never got another job. Really sick stuff. He's since deleted it from his twitter.

The thing is, he tried the "you just don't understand" thing with me, but that doesn't really work, since I'm smarter and more experienced in both SEO and AI than he is.. I only ever bought the course because I was curious to see how he does his topical maps. I had never digged too deeply into him. I just lightly read his stuff and thought "Yeah this is interesting, he's onto something", so that's why I bought his course when it was out. I quickly found out at that point it's a scam. He didn't have a single topical map as part of his course. The entire course is 100 videos of him utterly waffling on about nonsense for about 5 to 10 minutes in each video. You have to "piece it together" to work out how to do topical maps. He refused to give examples because he said he was too busy, and kept NPD-raging at everyone for asking in the group.

Shortly after he launched a $4997 private coaching where you would get topical maps done for you ;-)

But I dug into his course enough to figure out what he's actually teaching, and what he teaches does NOT work. It's not how you build topical authority. You don't contextually bridge jack shit. That actually hurts your site more than anything.

Here. This is one of the sites in his case studies :-

GetWordly.com


https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/
It's linked to from this. Feb 2021. Dropped March 2021, then went up, but got hit badly in jan 2021, then again in apr 2022, then again in dec 2022,then again with the march 2023 update.

It's now sitting at 106k traffic.

I mean come on. If he's the topical authority king you wouldn't see this. His site would go up, up, up and up.

Why do you think he's selling a course?

Do you see me selling courses?

You know what I do? I buy endless domains at auction and build up in-house AI content on them and make $$$. I don't need to sell courses, but I can actually rank sites. I just share my shit for free on here.

People who are selling you $997 courses with a $4997 private coaching session are not the real experts. I don't have TIME for that. I would take a hit in my income if I did that. I can make more building my own sites, and so could he if he knew what he was doing with SEO and AI.

Here's the other site on that case study:

www.interingilizce.com





Same. Hit by the same updates.

interingilzce has 300 pages and it's Turkish. He has 49.4k traffic on ahrefs as of today. Who can't get 50k with that many pages of low comp Turkish keywords like "must ile ilgili cümleler". Let's translate that: "phrases related to must". Oh look at that. Same crap he's got on his SEO site, but this time in Turkish. Very hard stuff to rank ;-) I could literally get some old school content spam tool and rank for those kind of keywords let alone modern AI content.


And getwordly? With its 106k traffic.

It has 781 pages..

This is like, the guy is racing against kids on biccyles, and he has a Kawasaki Ninja ZX-11. Then he makes a case study about how he won the race. Then he makes a course to teach people how to race.

Here's one of the keywords it ranks for in Turkish: "will ile ilgili cümleler". Translated to English: "related phrases for will". Oh come on..

Seriously, come on.

How do people fall for this stuff.

Is it that easy to scam people in SEO?

Pathetic.

If you look at 90% of his case studies, he gives you traffic, but doesn't even share the site.

https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0uLDJX7
4th project he says "400% organic traffic grwoth - focused on arabic countries" - Let me guess. "related phrases for will" translated to arabic?


And you know the funniest thing in all of this?

His course is "semantic SEO course".

He claims Google invented it with BERT..

Semantic SEO has nothing to do with BERT.

Semantic SEO actually has nothing to do with topical authority for that matter.

It was a type of web proposed years ago that was based on structured data representing knowledge.

Ie, schema ..

It's basically a way to make information machine readable.

It's since been pretty much abandoned, because in the days of AI, we don't NEED that. Which is what makes it hilarious when he says BERT gave birth to the semantic web. It's just some BS term he doesn't understand because he doesn't even understand English, let alone AI or SEO.

That's partly the problem. If a native English speaker tried to do what he does, they'd fail. He gets away with it because people assume his English is bad. It's not bad.. He's just not that smart and using a mix of terms he doesn't understand in ways that don't make sense.

 

[4440]

That's partly the problem. If a native English speaker tried to do what he does, they'd fail. He gets away with it because people assume his English is bad. It's not bad.. He's just not that smart and using a mix of terms he doesn't understand in ways that don't make sense.'

Yes, he misuses a lot of terms which is confusing. And people "forgive" him assuming his english is bad and gets along with it.

A lot of his terms are from the Great Bill Slawski and I'm sure he uses some SEO terms wrong and he misunderstand the terms.

 

[Kakashi Hatake]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot

 

[anssoft]

Hello,

Re-read it a couple of times. It's a COMPLETELY different approach.

It's the "same old silo" in the sense that you are linking in a similar way, but the way you plan it is completely different.

The most simplied way I can explain is this :-

Think of it more like rabbits multiplying.

You start with 1 article, and AS your writer is writing, you have him write out on the side new topical ideas based on what he's writing about, that he will then write an article about AND link from that original article.

So you have 1 article, as the writer is writing, he comes up with 5 other articles he could write to develop the ideas DEEPER that are in this article. That's 5 links. You now have 1 + 5 articles.

Repeat. You now have

1 + 5 + 25.

Repeat. You now have

1 + 5 + 25 + 125

You see?

You don't need to pre-plan or work out what to link to. The very way you do this, you have the internal links and the connected topics.

No one has ever talked about this before online that I've seen of. It's an entirely new way of approaching content plans.





No, you would never have a blog for each brand. That wouldn't work today. For brands.. No. It depends on the niche. You want stuff between low-med and medium. Ie, you can do persian cats. Cats is too big. Persian cats is small, but it's enough.

A site on just 1 brand of camera though is just weird.

Sure you can build a magazine if you have a large budget.

Thanks @splishsplash for your efforts and spend this time writing all of this, especially Koray's notes. I have gone through all his course videos and made all notes immediately after he launched his course. To be honest, his course is overrated.

For the silo method, what's your preferred method for linking to page P from level 2 and linking from level 3 to page A

 

[splishsplash]

Hello,





Thanks @splishsplash for your efforts and spend this time writing all of this, especially Koray's notes. I have gone through all his course videos and made all notes immediately after he launched his course. To be honest, his course is overrated.

For the silo method, what's your preferred method for linking to page P from level 2 and linking from level 3 to page A

Don't do structured linking like that. It's too unnatural. And page P is not necessarily more important than B.

Don't overthink silos. Just link where there is a natural linking opportunity. Don't try to artificially re-route juice.

 

[Yasseeoo]

Don't do structured linking like that. It's too unnatural. And page P is not necessarily more important than B.

Don't overthink silos. Just link where there is a natural linking opportunity. Don't try to artificially re-route juice.

Just wanted to get your opinion on this. Before I was thinking of starting two sites in the same niche, One focused on tutorials of the niche and the other more focused on news and other reports. Would it be better for me to combine both under one site and link the tutorials from the newspieces?

 

[splishsplash]

Just wanted to get your opinion on this. Before I was thinking of starting two sites in the same niche, One focused on tutorials of the niche and the other more focused on news and other reports. Would it be better for me to combine both under one site and link the tutorials from the newspieces?

This is a terrible idea. "Tutorials" isn't a niche..

You can't build topical authority with a tutorial site.

Well, you CAN, but you have to be HUGE. It's not practical.

Pick a niche. Smaller the better. Go deep into that niche covering everything.

 

[T2000]

Your method has made it so much easier and quicker to create topic clusters. It's amazing how many ideas you can come up with from a starting article, to deepen the topic even more. Trying to find related topics that can be linked together from research tools is such a pain compared to this.

Just a quick question, if i wanted to rank a review page, for example: Best Mens Beard Trimmers, that reviews the top 5 beard trimmers. I would need to cover the beard topic in full to have topical authority to rank. For example i would create articles such as:

Stating article>> How to groom your beard
> Sub topics from this main article >>> How to wash your beard < goes into more detail from the main article
> Sub sub topics >> What products to avoid using in your beard
>> How often you should wash your beard
>> what to apply after you have washed your beard

>>> How to trim and shape your beard
>> Tips to help you trim a symmetrical beard with your trimmer
>> Which beard trimmer attachments you need for certain beard styles
>> Which type of razor blade is best for outlining a beard

>> Why you should apply aftercare products especially for long haired beards
>> Why you should use beard oil
>> Why people with oily skin should use tea tree oil cream instated of oil for their beard
>> Why you should use a beard comb

And i continue to expand on this topic as much as i can with other beard related articles and deepen those. Am i right in thinking i would have topical authority for mens beards, and if i created money pages such as best mens beard trimmers, best mens beard oils, best mens beard comb, and so on, these would have an easier time ranking as i have built topical authority for mens beards?

 

[splishsplash]

Your method has made it so much easier and quicker to create topic clusters. It's amazing how many ideas you can come up with from a starting article, to deepen the topic even more. Trying to find related topics that can be linked together from research tools is such a pain compared to this.

Just a quick question, if i wanted to rank a review page, for example: Best Mens Beard Trimmers, that reviews the top 5 beard trimmers. I would need to cover the beard topic in full to have topical authority to rank. For example i would create articles such as:

Stating article>> How to groom your beard
> Sub topics from this main article >>> How to wash your beard < goes into more detail from the main article
> Sub sub topics >> What products to avoid using in your beard
>> How often you should wash your beard
>> what to apply after you have washed your beard

>>> How to trim and shape your beard
>> Tips to help you trim a symmetrical beard with your trimmer
>> Which beard trimmer attachments you need for certain beard styles
>> Which type of razor blade is best for outlining a beard

>> Why you should apply aftercare products especially for long haired beards
>> Why you should use beard oil
>> Why people with oily skin should use tea tree oil cream instated of oil for their beard
>> Why you should use a beard comb

And i continue to expand on this topic as much as i can with other beard related articles and deepen those. Am i right in thinking i would have topical authority for mens beards, and if i created money pages such as best mens beard trimmers, best mens beard oils, best mens beard comb, and so on, these would have an easier time ranking as i have built topical authority for mens beards?

Yep you're absolutely correct in your thinking.

 

[Anish Akram]

Here's a new technique that will help you build more topical authority and is in line with how the Google algorithm works in 2023.

Traditionally you have something called the reverse virtual silo.

This worked really well in the past because of the way juice flowed.

In the past there was just 1 way for pages to get more "power" and this was through PageRank flow.

In the distance past PR flowed through pages through internal links. Any link passed PR. It would lose some with each link otherwise we'd have infinite PR.

Simple enough.. This was the original purpose of siloing. (Siloing works today, but for different reasons than in the past. In the past it was for PR sculpting, not creating topical clusters for topical authority)

Then Google changed things and the more related 2 pages were the more juice would flow. We don't know how they did this. I'm not sure when it started either. It was probably before AI and they would do some simple comparisons to check the relevance between 2 pages.

So if you link internally from your dog to cat page, a little PR flows, but if you link from your dog to dog page, more flows.

Because of this, a technique was created called the reverse virtual silo.

It worked like this.

You have your pillar article P, and you create support articles, A, B, C, D and E.

A-E link to P.

A links to B, B to C, C to D, D to E, E to A.

You then send a backlink to P, A, B, C, D and E and everything moves up.

But, there's another, more potent way that pages increase in rank now.

That's topical authority.

1 way to increase it is by creating more content within the topical clusters, and those clusters move up.

However, you also increase the rank of all pages within the clusters as you link to articles within those clusters.

Which makes sense.. Think about it. If an article like "How to train your bulldog" gets strong links, why would google not raise the rank of a page "How to groom your bulldog" ?

Instead of just simple PR flow through pages, they are likely causing PR to flow into clusters no matter how they're linked.

This would make much more sense from an engineering standpoint rather than simply causing PR to flow through internal links alone and it's in line with observations of how things work today.

We just don't know the technical details of the clustering other than that they'll need a very fast way to do it.

This means it's probably not super complicated. It'll be some fast sentence transformer model and then a clustering algorithm. New pages will have their distance measured from each cluster and be placed into a cluster accordingly. How they decide on new clusters is unknown.

What this means for us at a practical level is we want to be creating pages that have a distance in vector space close to the page we're most interested in ranking.

What's vector space?

Vectors are what machine learning uses. Vector space is the space that vectors exist in. A dense vector is a representation in vector space of some object, an object being text from a page.

This leads to the thought:

"What's the easiest way to decide on other topics that are going to be close in vector space to my original article?"

You can use tools and look up various questions/keywords and try to find ones close, but..

A much more natural and reliable way is to simply DEEPEN the topics that you're already talking about on the page.

When you write, you might take a couple of paragraphs to discuss a topic. But, many of these topics you are lightly going into could be deepened and have their own article created.

So let me give you an example.

Let's imagine, this article I'm writing here is the very page I want to deepen.


First topic I discussed: "Traditionally you have something called the reverse virtual silo."

So here's an opportunity. I could write another page about reverse virtual silos.

I would then link off to that. Not that it's NEEDED for juice flow, but this helps Google crawl all the related pages and probably makes it easier to cluster. You want to make things as easy as possible for the crawler. This is technical SEO. (Oh there we go, technical SEO, crawling. I can create more pages about these. Juice flow.. Another one )

Next I talk about "Then Google changed things and the more related 2 pages were the more juice would flow. We don't know how they did this. I'm not sure when it started either. It was probably before AI and they would do some simple comparisons to check the relevance between 2 pages."

So from this I could create another article about how google would send more PR between relevant pages.

Then I say "1 way to increase it is by creating more content within the topical clusters, and those clusters move up."

I could create another article talking about topical clusters. What are they, how do they work, how might google cluster"

You see? I'm barely 2-3 paragraphs into my article and already I have another 5-6 article ideas, that are BY DEFINITION close to the original article in vector space. They are by definition close because they are topics within the article, that me, as a human, can see are related. It's not arbitrary keywords I'm trying to write about and create an artificial relation. It's a REAL and DEEP relation. I am DEEPENING my content.

And what about those 6 articles I'd create? I'd do exactly the same in those. What about if I already have covered something? Great, I just link. Eventually I'll have covered a HUGE amount, filling in every little gap that google will see me as an ultra authority within this cluster, and everything within it will move up in rankings.

THEN, when I send some strong links anywhere into this cluster, the ENTIRE CLUSTER moves up.

And as I naturally expand this cluster, the cluster grows, and mini-clusters within the big cluster appear until I have a giant cluster, with sub clusters and sub-sub clusters and I'm a topical authority on everything SEO.


So the Reverse Reverse Virtual Silo, or Reverse Squared Virtual Silo is this

Start with a pillar article, and deepen it, creating related articles going deeper about all the topics, and link to those articles from your pillar.

So it's your PILLAR that links out to the "support" articles.

Note. It doesn't need to be a pillar. It's just a starting article of some sort, but ideally it's a slightly broader one so it has many topics within you can expand on.

Your support articles will then link to other support articles, but not artificially in some A->B->C->A pattern, but rather filling out gaps and deepening the topics it's already discussing.

In summary:

Rather than create a pillar, then artificially create support articles that link to the pillar.

Create a pillar, then deepen the topics within the pillar by writing articles that cover those sub-topics in depth, link to those from the pillar, and then backlink those articles, and your pillar will become stronger and stronger.

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.

 

[KingCoppyWritter]

Nice

 

[laur.laurix]

When is the backflip rainbow silo tehnique coming out?

 

[fg43085]

I am using this method on my website and I did not see it anywhere explained earlier on the internet. Thanks.

There is slight difference internal linking, but making sub topic is the same analogy.
Where appropriate expand the knowledge fkr the reader is possible to explain deep the paragraph.

Makes sense everything and if you read article it is natural that you will click for more information about the topic you are interested in.

 

[kruczek123]

Yep you're absolutely correct in your thinking.

Hello, I have read the entire topic
And your statements are great.

About a year ago I created a website about The Sims 4.
Can you advise what topics to create and how to look at them to thoroughly cover the topic?

To achieve this EEAT?

 

[MonkeyJohn]

This is great. Like the idea of not having to start with a massive keyword list first. Apologies if you have mentioned (could not find) but what would be the URL structure for these articles and does it matter?

Something like entry article/chain article level 1/chain article level 2/chart article level 3/etc...

Thanks!

 

[the breaks]

Great article @splishsplash. Very intuitive and it makes perfect sense for where things are going. Curious how you fit this concept into an e-commerce site with a blog. Say you have the blog that builds topical authority for product listing page A. Considering the latest core updates, do you still use an old silo linking system to product listing page A from the blog's topical clusters or is the machine learning good enough now that those old internal linking systems to product listing page A aren't even necessary because it knows your website is a topical authority on A so will help category page A rank higher anyway with or without an old school silo internal linking structure?

 

[splishsplash]

Great article @splishsplash. Very intuitive and it makes perfect sense for where things are going. Curious how you fit this concept into an e-commerce site with a blog. Say you have the blog that builds topical authority for product listing page A. Considering the latest core updates, do you still use an old silo linking system to product listing page A from the blog's topical clusters or is the machine learning good enough now that those old internal linking systems to product listing page A aren't even necessary because it knows your website is a topical authority on A so will help category page A rank higher anyway with or without an old school silo internal linking structure?

This is less relevant for ecommerce.

Ranking ecommerce sites is about site architecture and links. Not really topical authority.. They may have some sort "topical authority" for products, ie, the more products you have in given areas, the stronger you are, but this is just pure conjecture and not something I've looked into.

I would never assume Google can understand your site well enough that you don't need to make it easy for it to understand, no.

For siloing an ecommerce site you just do it logically and use physical silos. Link between related categories. Have breadcrumbs. Make sure all the product information is added to your product pages. Make sure category pages have some content below the products. That's not always necessary, but it usually helps to thicken ecommerce sites.

Ecom is very much common sense. Make it logical, clean, comprehensive and easy to crawl, then get strong links to your category and product pages.


Info content won't help your ecom rank.

You'll rank the info pages and that may get you more sales, but in my experience I don't notice much of an effect by building topical authority with informational articles and ease of ranking ecommerce pages within that. They seem to be separate things according to the algorithm.