Competitor strange silo structure - have you ever seen this?

F4lken

F4lken

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Hi guys

I'm looking at one of my competior Amazon affiliate sites, this is a very big one which ranks for 100K + keywords and dominates a lot of 1st spot on the SERP for a lot of profitable kw.

Now, I notice his site is not only watertight structured...but have almost no interlinking at all.
I mean, for a siloed structure on amazon aff site I think about something like this:

Q2r7MXm



Now, this site is like this:

EvENU6r


The comparison articles seems to be lonely islands which are not interlinked at all, supporting articles apart; they still seems to benefit from their high DR since they have incredibles rankings.

Is this some known structure I am aware of?

Maybe are they doing this to prevent their KW to be stolen / mislead competitors , nothing someone with ahrefs / semrush cannot trace anyway.


Have you ever seen something like this?
 
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I've seen a site like this, not recently, with almost no interlinking. I was a newbie in the online field back then. I still don't know how they rank.
 
Topical relevancy matters more. Is your competitor's content all revolving around the same topic?
 
hippo123 said:
Topical relevancy matters more. Is your competitor's content all revolving around the same topic?
Click to expand...
No, this is the stranger thing. They are random topics not related at all between them. Just an huge Amazon affiliate site filled of comparative articles.
 
Have you looked at the theme and plugins used on the site?
 
ProfessorFalken said:
No, this is the stranger thing. They are random topics not related at all between them. Just an huge Amazon affiliate site filled of comparative articles.
Click to expand...

This is probably why. When you think about it, it's almost like creating sub domains for each niche, but you get to leverage the domain authority. I imagine he carefully funnels homepage links somewhere into the tiers, but it's possibly a way for them to keep their relevancy air tight. Did you look at the link profile? If the homepage is fully disconnected, then he's probably treating each niche almost as an independent site, then linking directly to the niches and not doing much for the homepage. Crawl the site from the homepage and see if you make it into any of the internal pages.
 
It's not that weird. I've seen several "product comparison sites" or review sites built that way. Each category is a subdomain on its own, acting like an individual site.
I think that if you do SEO per pillar article your SEO would be much more relevant, and having several relevant sub-sections of your sites will probably help general SEO as well.
 
Links are spread 95% homepage + few links on most competitive KW articles.

MisterF said:
Have you looked at the theme and plugins used on the site?
Click to expand...

Yes, an ordinary theme completely "clipped" of unnecessary parts

SilverBull said:
It's not that weird. I've seen several "product comparison sites" or review sites built that way. Each category is a subdomain on its own, acting like an individual site.
I think that if you do SEO per pillar article your SEO would be much more relevant, and having several relevant sub-sections of your sites will probably help general SEO as well.
Click to expand...

The problem here is no category exists at all. Permalinks are like www.domain.com/product1 , www.domain.com/product2

seo said:
This is probably why. When you think about it, it's almost like creating sub domains for each niche, but you get to leverage the domain authority. I imagine he carefully funnels homepage links somewhere into the tiers, but it's possibly a way for them to keep their relevancy air tight. Did you look at the link profile? If the homepage is fully disconnected, then he's probably treating each niche almost as an independent site, then linking directly to the niches and not doing much for the homepage. Crawl the site from the homepage and see if you make it into any of the internal pages.
Click to expand...

You pointed me out what was already under my eyes:

In the home there is a little sidebar linking to "recent articles" where there are linked lasts 12 comparative reviews. This is still nonsense since, in theory, once the links to old articles has gone they should fall from serp to the detriment of the newest ones.
 
ProfessorFalken said:
You pointed me out what was already under my eyes:

In the home there is a little sidebar linking to "recent articles" where there are linked lasts 12 comparative reviews. This is still nonsense since, in theory, once the links to old articles has gone they should fall from serp to the detriment of the newest ones.
Click to expand...

Kind of. Maybe they're careful to include 1 article from each category. That will still send homepage juice into those pages, out to the categories and into each individual article (granted it decreases with each step). Also, just because it says "Recent Articles" it may still be static. You can check this by going to the example.com/feed/ and see if those are truly the newest articles. 12 is kind of a weird number for recent articles, so my guess is they probably have 12 "categories" or "niches" and they have 1 article from each niche in the "recent articles" to spread out the link juice from the homepage.
 
ProfessorFalken said:
The problem here is no category exists at all. Permalinks are like ...
Click to expand...
So instead of categories they go straight to the products. It makes sense at some level. Why bother with so much work when you can direct people and link juice to your money pages? instead of money site, they have money pages. Or so I guess.
I think without seeing the site itself there is no real discussion, because there are so many parameters as to why the website is built this way.
 
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