A quick note from seocrab
Hey everyone, I've been having a good month and decided to give back to the community with another in-depth guide, this time on siloing content (see the previous beginner's guide to free keyword research).
I've tried to make this as accessible to newbies as possible. If you have any questions about silo structures or using them on affiliate sites in particular (my specialty), reply to this thread and I will do my best to help out.
Now onto the good stuff...
How to use a silo structure on affiliate sites in 2019 [w/ examples]
If you've been on BHW for more than a minute, you'll probably have heard of content silos.
To most of the world, a silo is a bulk grain storage system. To SEOs, a silo is a site architecture method that can help boost rankings and pageviews through strategic internal linking.
For an affiliate like me, that means more $$$.
Silo content structures are nothing new. Bruce Clay has been writing about silos since 2006.
Smarter BHW contributers than me have written excellent guides on siloing over the years. For example, you should really read Tom Belfort's silo AMA (@splishsplash) and silo guide.
In this guide, I'm going to expand on Bruce and Tom's work by taking you through what a silo is and how to build affiliate websites using a silo structure.
Most of my experience is with WordPress, so I'll also explain how to setup a simple silo in WordPress.
Why website silo structures work
To illustrate why silo structures work, I will borrow from the work of Stephen Cronin (who wrote this guide to siloing in 2012).
Not only can you or I find an orange jelly bean easier in the silo, so can Google.
By sorting your jelly beans into silos, Google can easily crawl your site and assign topical relevance for yellow jelly beans, orange jelly beans, green jelly beans, pink jelly beans AND generic jelly beans, instead of just generic jelly beans.
And Google doesn't like serving general content - its algorithms are trained to give searchers the most relevant results. Siloing makes your site more relevant.
In many cases, relevance > authority when it comes to ranking. And the good news is that relevance is a lot easier to build than authority.
The easy way to silo
The simplest way to get a good silo structure is to create a tiny micro-niche website.
For example, a site completely dedicated to dog collars will naturally have a silo structure. The homepage will likely be about dog collars in general, and each post will be about a specific dog collar review. Informational content, e.g. a guide to dog collar materials, will also fit into this natural silo. You can interlink between all posts freely because they are all very relevant to the topic of dog collars.
However, if you want to grow a site to more than a 30-page micro-niche site, you'll need to work a bit harder on your silo structure.
What does a content silo look like?
Theory is boring, so I'm going to show you what a good content silo looks like on a real website that ranks well in 2019.
Note: To avoid outing any sites belonging to BHW members (incl.myself!), I'll only use well-known websites in this guide.
I was reading the Inc. 5000 list of 2019's most successful businesses in America, and spotted some huge affiliate websites on the list.
ConsumerAffairs.com generated almost $30 million in 2018, and will likely do better in 2019.
Browsing ConsumerAffairs is like taking a MasterClass in siloing content.
The site has over 300 categories, across a range of different topics. I used Scrapebox to scrape URLs from the sitemap and there were more than 17,000 pages.
How can you best organize 17,000 pages? With a content silo!
There are two big silo clues on the homepage:
Which brings me to silo golden rule number 1:
Silo golden rule #1: Top content must be no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage
Despite having over 17,000 pages, ConsumerAffairs manages to link its top pages within 2 clicks from the homepage, and 3 clicks for all pages.
See it for yourself: click the Buyers Guides menu link on ConsumerAffairs and you'll see it opens the top categories and a link to the category overview.
From each category landing page, there are more links to the sub-categories on the same topic.
Simple breadcrumb links show how these pages are connected to the homepage:
Why is this important? Because most backlinks go to the homepage, and Google will see it as the most authoritative page on the website. In simplistic terms, the closer other pages are to the homepage, the more important they look to Google.
Googlebot wants to be as efficient as possible when it crawls a website because crawling is expensive. If you give Googlebot a simple crawl path, you have a better chance of getting crawled more and seen as an authority in each silo topic.
Silo golden rule #2: Only interlink within the silo
You might be thinking: "if the homepage is so important, why don't I link to all my pages from there!". Well, if you run a small micro-niche site, that's fine. But if you publish content on multiple topics, you need to keep your silos seperate.
You can see what I mean on TheWirecutter.com - there's a page for each category (all linked to from the homepage, of course) that lists all pages related to that topic.
Aside from menu links, each individual post only sends internal links to topically-relevant content within the silo.
For example, a Wirecutter page on "Best Lightning Cable" sends internal links to other pages in the electronics category, like "Best USB Battery Packs", and "Best Micro USB Cable".
Bonus tip: you'll also notice that on The Wirecutter, internal links are merely underlined, while external (affiliate) links are in bold and red. That's a clever way of using plenty of internal links for Google, but discouraging user clicks on anything but affiliate links.
You can do this yourself with some simple CSS.
There are always exceptions to any rule but, in general, keeping your internal links within each silo will help improve your relevancy for key topics, especially if you cover a broader niche.
More relevancy = better ranking.
How to structure a silo in WordPress
WordPress makes it really easy to build a silo structure.
Step 1: Categorize your content
Look at a list of all your content pages and break them down thematically. You can do this with pen and paper, a spreadsheet or whatever tool you prefer.
For example, if you have a site about sporting equipment, each sport would be a separate silo, like this:
If you have ranking data, look at some of your top keywords and group them into silos too.
Fun side effect: You'll probably find lots of new keyword opportunities once you start thinking about your site in silos.
Step 2: Pick a WordPress silo type
Remember that silos are about two things: topic landing pages and internal links.
There are two ways to achieve a silo structure in WordPress:
Smaller sites do just fine with a virtual silo.
Step 3: Add silo topics as categories
Remember: if you're working on an existing site, take a full backup before making any changes in case you mess something up. If you have a staging site, use it.
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Posts > Categories and create a category for each silo.
Depending on how large your site is, you can also create sub-categories with a parent category (e.g. mysite.com/golf/clubs/club-review-post)
Step 4: Change permalink structure
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks, select Custom Structure and add /%category%/%postname%/ into the box.
WARNING: If you change the URL of old content, you'll need to 301 redirect it to the new page to avoid losing traffic or rankings. A plugin like Redirection will let you do this, or you can edit your .htaccess file.
Step 5: Review your links
Start with your menu bar and link out to each main silo category page.
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance > Menus and you'll see a section to add category pages right there.
Next, edit each individual post and make sure you're only linking to relevant content within the same silo.
When you're done, your links should look something like this image from Authority Hacker's post on site achitecture:
If you have a lot of content, use a tool like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 pages) to crawl your site and produce a map of internal links.
Step 6: Check for errors and update your sitemap
Finally, when you think you've finished, check your site for 404 errors or broken images (Screaming Frog will help with this too) and check your sitemap (e.g. mysite.com/sitemap.xml) contains your new URL structures.
Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and you're done.
Summary
By using silos to organize your content and internal links, your site is:
There are many different approaches and theories on siloing: the best way to find out what works is to take action right now. Measure what works, change what doesn't. Your own experience will give you more insight than this guide or any best practices can.
Happy ranking
Hey everyone, I've been having a good month and decided to give back to the community with another in-depth guide, this time on siloing content (see the previous beginner's guide to free keyword research).
I've tried to make this as accessible to newbies as possible. If you have any questions about silo structures or using them on affiliate sites in particular (my specialty), reply to this thread and I will do my best to help out.
Now onto the good stuff...
How to use a silo structure on affiliate sites in 2019 [w/ examples]
If you've been on BHW for more than a minute, you'll probably have heard of content silos.
To most of the world, a silo is a bulk grain storage system. To SEOs, a silo is a site architecture method that can help boost rankings and pageviews through strategic internal linking.
For an affiliate like me, that means more $$$.
Silo content structures are nothing new. Bruce Clay has been writing about silos since 2006.
Smarter BHW contributers than me have written excellent guides on siloing over the years. For example, you should really read Tom Belfort's silo AMA (@splishsplash) and silo guide.
In this guide, I'm going to expand on Bruce and Tom's work by taking you through what a silo is and how to build affiliate websites using a silo structure.
Most of my experience is with WordPress, so I'll also explain how to setup a simple silo in WordPress.
Why website silo structures work
To illustrate why silo structures work, I will borrow from the work of Stephen Cronin (who wrote this guide to siloing in 2012).
Not only can you or I find an orange jelly bean easier in the silo, so can Google.
By sorting your jelly beans into silos, Google can easily crawl your site and assign topical relevance for yellow jelly beans, orange jelly beans, green jelly beans, pink jelly beans AND generic jelly beans, instead of just generic jelly beans.
And Google doesn't like serving general content - its algorithms are trained to give searchers the most relevant results. Siloing makes your site more relevant.
In many cases, relevance > authority when it comes to ranking. And the good news is that relevance is a lot easier to build than authority.
The easy way to silo
The simplest way to get a good silo structure is to create a tiny micro-niche website.
For example, a site completely dedicated to dog collars will naturally have a silo structure. The homepage will likely be about dog collars in general, and each post will be about a specific dog collar review. Informational content, e.g. a guide to dog collar materials, will also fit into this natural silo. You can interlink between all posts freely because they are all very relevant to the topic of dog collars.
However, if you want to grow a site to more than a 30-page micro-niche site, you'll need to work a bit harder on your silo structure.
What does a content silo look like?
Theory is boring, so I'm going to show you what a good content silo looks like on a real website that ranks well in 2019.
Note: To avoid outing any sites belonging to BHW members (incl.myself!), I'll only use well-known websites in this guide.
I was reading the Inc. 5000 list of 2019's most successful businesses in America, and spotted some huge affiliate websites on the list.
ConsumerAffairs.com generated almost $30 million in 2018, and will likely do better in 2019.
Browsing ConsumerAffairs is like taking a MasterClass in siloing content.
The site has over 300 categories, across a range of different topics. I used Scrapebox to scrape URLs from the sitemap and there were more than 17,000 pages.
How can you best organize 17,000 pages? With a content silo!
There are two big silo clues on the homepage:
- The "Buyers Guides" menu link, which takes you to /resources/ and a list of all categories
- A list of popular categories right on the homepage
Which brings me to silo golden rule number 1:
Silo golden rule #1: Top content must be no more than 2 clicks away from the homepage
Despite having over 17,000 pages, ConsumerAffairs manages to link its top pages within 2 clicks from the homepage, and 3 clicks for all pages.
See it for yourself: click the Buyers Guides menu link on ConsumerAffairs and you'll see it opens the top categories and a link to the category overview.
From each category landing page, there are more links to the sub-categories on the same topic.
Simple breadcrumb links show how these pages are connected to the homepage:
Why is this important? Because most backlinks go to the homepage, and Google will see it as the most authoritative page on the website. In simplistic terms, the closer other pages are to the homepage, the more important they look to Google.
Googlebot wants to be as efficient as possible when it crawls a website because crawling is expensive. If you give Googlebot a simple crawl path, you have a better chance of getting crawled more and seen as an authority in each silo topic.
Silo golden rule #2: Only interlink within the silo
You might be thinking: "if the homepage is so important, why don't I link to all my pages from there!". Well, if you run a small micro-niche site, that's fine. But if you publish content on multiple topics, you need to keep your silos seperate.
You can see what I mean on TheWirecutter.com - there's a page for each category (all linked to from the homepage, of course) that lists all pages related to that topic.
Aside from menu links, each individual post only sends internal links to topically-relevant content within the silo.
For example, a Wirecutter page on "Best Lightning Cable" sends internal links to other pages in the electronics category, like "Best USB Battery Packs", and "Best Micro USB Cable".
Bonus tip: you'll also notice that on The Wirecutter, internal links are merely underlined, while external (affiliate) links are in bold and red. That's a clever way of using plenty of internal links for Google, but discouraging user clicks on anything but affiliate links.
You can do this yourself with some simple CSS.
There are always exceptions to any rule but, in general, keeping your internal links within each silo will help improve your relevancy for key topics, especially if you cover a broader niche.
More relevancy = better ranking.
How to structure a silo in WordPress
WordPress makes it really easy to build a silo structure.
Step 1: Categorize your content
Look at a list of all your content pages and break them down thematically. You can do this with pen and paper, a spreadsheet or whatever tool you prefer.
For example, if you have a site about sporting equipment, each sport would be a separate silo, like this:
- Golf
- Tennis
- Football
- Hockey
- Golf clubs
- Golf bags
- Golf balls
- Golf tips
- Drivers
- Irons
- Wedges
- Putter
If you have ranking data, look at some of your top keywords and group them into silos too.
Fun side effect: You'll probably find lots of new keyword opportunities once you start thinking about your site in silos.
Step 2: Pick a WordPress silo type
Remember that silos are about two things: topic landing pages and internal links.
There are two ways to achieve a silo structure in WordPress:
- using category slugs, also known as a physical silo, e.g. mysite.com/topic1/article1 (I will show you this below)
- virtual siloing e.g. mysite.com/topic1 landing page that links to related articles like mysite.com/article1 (a plugin like WP Show Posts will help you display relevant posts on a landing page).
Smaller sites do just fine with a virtual silo.
Step 3: Add silo topics as categories
Remember: if you're working on an existing site, take a full backup before making any changes in case you mess something up. If you have a staging site, use it.
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Posts > Categories and create a category for each silo.
Depending on how large your site is, you can also create sub-categories with a parent category (e.g. mysite.com/golf/clubs/club-review-post)
Step 4: Change permalink structure
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks, select Custom Structure and add /%category%/%postname%/ into the box.
WARNING: If you change the URL of old content, you'll need to 301 redirect it to the new page to avoid losing traffic or rankings. A plugin like Redirection will let you do this, or you can edit your .htaccess file.
Step 5: Review your links
Start with your menu bar and link out to each main silo category page.
From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance > Menus and you'll see a section to add category pages right there.
Next, edit each individual post and make sure you're only linking to relevant content within the same silo.
When you're done, your links should look something like this image from Authority Hacker's post on site achitecture:
If you have a lot of content, use a tool like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 pages) to crawl your site and produce a map of internal links.
Step 6: Check for errors and update your sitemap
Finally, when you think you've finished, check your site for 404 errors or broken images (Screaming Frog will help with this too) and check your sitemap (e.g. mysite.com/sitemap.xml) contains your new URL structures.
Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and you're done.
Summary
By using silos to organize your content and internal links, your site is:
- Easy to navigate for users = more pageviews, more time on page
- Easy to crawl for Googlebot = better crawl rate, more relevancy for different topics
There are many different approaches and theories on siloing: the best way to find out what works is to take action right now. Measure what works, change what doesn't. Your own experience will give you more insight than this guide or any best practices can.
Happy ranking
