- Oct 9, 2013
- 3,117
- 12,597
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.
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.