[How-To] Guide to Building SEO Silos: Full Amazon Example

Thanks for the guide! I found the Yoast configuration tutorial posted to be very helpful. That said, im having trouble putting together my website which is small to meduim. I have a static homepage that has 8 child pages. The problem I have is that the static homepage title appears in all my child pages.

For example, this is what I wat I get:

www.shaverdude.com/Shaving-Guides-and-Reviews-of-2016/The-Best-Electical-Shaver


Which what I want is:


www.shaverdude.com/Best-Eletrical-Shaver

How would I go about fixing this? I'm scratching my head trying to figure this out and ive gotten no where. Thoughts?

Permalinks WP addon. Download the plugin and configure it to have your child page named as your post.

Thanks for sharing!...This was a very interesting guide

thanks for sharing

Thanks for sharing mate! I've a question:
I've found some good keywords in a niche and I started to build my website's structure. It seems to be something like that (is an example but it's really similar to what i get):
http://www.compactcameras.com/compacts-brand/brand-series-700/brand-725
It's correct or could it be improved?

Thank you so much, I really appreciate your efforts!

splishsplash said:

Side Note 2: There are 2 core ways to make money in a niche.

1) Create multiple big 3000 word 'best of' guides for different sub-niches and build up your relevancy for reviews. A lot of them tend to be medium comp, so to rank for the review keywords you need at least moderate SEO.

2) To make money without ANY SEO, go super deep into 1 sub-niche. Silo out all the brands. Have comparison pages for the brands and review EVERY product you can find and create even more supporting articles. 100-150 pages, with siloing, and no backlinks and you are going to make money. I can't promise $1000's, but as long as you've not picked a stupid niche, you should hit at least $200-$300/mo up to about $1k/mo. 100 articles for $200-$300/mo might not seem great, but when that money is recurring, it allows you to then reinvest that into your next amazon review site, and this time make it a smaller site with more powerful SEO.

Click to expand...

hey splishsplash

ok, I have a small site, I'm going to break out silos for each brand like you suggest in #2 here.

You say have comparison pages for the brands - do these take place of the 3000 word "best of" guides (as the parent pages of the reviews)? or do you still write those best of guides and add comparison pages along with the reviews?

If you do comparison pages instead of "best of" guides, should these be large 3000+ words to build topical relevance or not necessary to for them to be so lengthy?

Sorry, I'm sure I'm over thinking things here. I've read guides a hundred times and now I'm confusing myself while I'm implementing into a real site.

Thanks again for the amazing guide and thanks in advance for your reply.

thanks, very helpful.

Yeah you're overthinking this WAY too much, bro. Everyone does this with silos. I still do it. There's something about them that causes it.

The reality is they are SUPER simple.

You could literally just have a completely flat structure on your site, add 10 support articles, link them contextually to each other, and to the parent page(the page you want to juice up), remove other menus/dropdowns/excessive linking so you just have your main primary bar, your breadcrumbs and a small sidebar linking to the other support pages. You could link to all 10 in the sidebar, or you could link to just 3, or maybe 5. It doesn't matter. The main thing is link contextually from each support page to at least 1 other support page, and most importantly link contextually, early in the article, with an exact or lsi anchor to your main parent page.

Job done. You don't even need to bother with hierarchy. Let's even forget the term 'siloing'. You're just creating "authority hubs".

baddrunk said:

hey splishsplash

ok, I have a small site, I'm going to break out silos for each brand like you suggest in #2 here.

You say have comparison pages for the brands - do these take place of the 3000 word "best of" guides (as the parent pages of the reviews)? or do you still write those best of guides and add comparison pages along with the reviews?

If you do comparison pages instead of "best of" guides, should these be large 3000+ words to build topical relevance or not necessary to for them to be so lengthy?

Sorry, I'm sure I'm over thinking things here. I've read guides a hundred times and now I'm confusing myself while I'm implementing into a real site.

Thanks again for the amazing guide and thanks in advance for your reply.

Click to expand...

Great article, I use similar silo structures for my websites.

@splishsplash gotcha thanks again for taking the time to clear things up

Hi @splishsplash I'm still finding your guides mega helpful!

I have a question about using silos and PBN links. Say for a 20 page site, with 3 silo parent pages, I only have 10 PBN links I could use, how would you distribute these across the site?

a) All to home page to increase site authority, relying on siloing to rank inner pages
b) Targeting 1 or more silo parent pages?
c) Targeting the low level silo'd pages


Think I would go for "B", what would you do?

Thanks!

I use reverse silos these days. Different than I wrote about in my guide.

Based on the structure that's in my guide, 20% to the homepage and 80% to the parent pages.

With reverse siloing around 10% to the homepage, 40% to the parent and 50% spread out across the support pages.

MonkeyJohn said:

Hi @splishsplash I'm still finding your guides mega helpful!

I have a question about using silos and PBN links. Say for a 20 page site, with 3 silo parent pages, I only have 10 PBN links I could use, how would you distribute these across the site?

a) All to home page to increase site authority, relying on siloing to rank inner pages
b) Targeting 1 or more silo parent pages?
c) Targeting the low level silo'd pages


Think I would go for "B", what would you do?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Thanks!

Whats a reverse silo?

One thing.

What's the difference between a regular wordpress website without any tweaking and a siloed wordpress website after tweaking?

I mean, isn't wordpress fundamentally a silo strutured CMS?

Homepage > Categories > Posts within the relevant category.

The only thing I'd change on some themes is that some of them have a "most recent" posts on sidebar which pretty much ruins the contextuality. IMO having a sidebar plugin to show posts relevant to the category the current post you're in is even better than doing only the type of siloed shown in OP (where the posts themselves only link to homepage / parent AKA category)

MonkeyJohn said:

Thanks!

Whats a reverse silo?

Click to expand...

A reverse silo is when you build posts to the support pages rather than the homepage. The support pages are also easier to get links to because they're almost always non-commercial and helpful in nature.

The structure of the reverse silo is more or less the same to be honest. The only difference is that you link to the support instead of the homepage.

spectrejoe said:

One thing.

What's the difference between a regular wordpress website without any tweaking and a siloed wordpress website after tweaking?

I mean, isn't wordpress fundamentally a silo strutured CMS?

Homepage > Categories > Posts within the relevant category.

The only thing I'd change on some themes is that some of them have a "most recent" posts on sidebar which pretty much ruins the contextuality. IMO having a sidebar plugin to show posts relevant to the category the current post you're in is even better than doing only the type of siloed shown in OP (where the posts themselves only link to homepage / parent AKA category)

Click to expand...

wordpress is definitely not a silo structured CMS

Posts have multiple categories and tags. Then you have author pages and archives.

To make matters worse your category and tag pages are just big lists of links full of duplicate content. When do you ever see a category page ranking?

Companies like yoast will tell you things like



from https://yoast.com/category-seo/


Well, really, yoast? I wonder if that's actually true, or if you're just writing crap to sell your premium plugin. ;-)

Now, yoast.com is a pretty damn powerful site, right? No one will disagree with that. Not only are they powerful but they are the damn authority on wordpress setup for SEO and they have just told us that category pages are more important than individual landing pages. Their setup must be flawless.

Ok, let's check out their category pages on ahrefs.

https://yoast.com/cat/content-seo/
https://yoast.com/cat/wordpress/
https://yoast.com/cat/seo/

They look nice. They've got custom headings and titles, some unique content up the top, some contextual links in that unique content. Sexy stuff.

But are they just dressing up a turd?






Well, what do we have here..

3 of their biggest category pages, each with a damn hefty chunk of backlinks from a lot of unique referring domains. Their SEO cat has 490 from 196. That's pretty solid.

13 keywords and 30 traffic on content-seo? 75 keywords on their wordpress cat, and only 46 on seo with a mere 675 traffic.

Pretty abysmal. If yoast.com, an authority and expert on SEO and wordpress, author of the most popular wordpress SEO plugin can't even rank their cat pages on a site that has 65 trustflow and 70 Ahrefs Domain Rating, then that's telling us something pretty damn obvious IMO


On the other hand here's a piece of content with a similar amount of backlinks and RD.



But, yes, yoast, category pages are your most important landing pages that should be ranking ;-)


Back to the real world.

If you're going to use categories/tags for users and menus, then noindex them and just link contextually within your content. You don't even need a menu structure. If you have a blog with 200 articles, create topical groups, let's say 20 groups of 10. 9 of those articles link contextually to the "parent".

Go one step further and create a custom menu for each group, so each page in the group of 10 has a menu at the side with the 9 other pages, and the contextual link to the parent.

Siloing isn't just about having a "tree structure". It's about creating topical groups.

So what you're saying is that it isn't a silo structured CMS due to tags + archives & the way categories are structured?

I've always disabled archives and never used tags simply to avoid duplicate content so I guess I've always done the right thing for siloing by instinct. About categories I guess the only difference is that in one you have no content only internal linking and in the other you have both content and internal linking.

I guess I agree with you that the second option is obviously better for relevancy but I don't think your category page having content or not affects rankings that much honestly

Your category or tag pages won't damage your site. Google is well aware of wordpress and it's dup content.

But, siloing isn't about "not doing damage".

Siloing is about getting a HUGE BOOST. If wordpress out the box was a silo, then the category pages would be ranking and juicing up everything else. They don't. They add no SEO value unless you do custom category pages with unique content and do proper silo linking.

spectrejoe said:

So what you're saying is that it isn't a silo structured CMS due to tags + archives & the way categories are structured?

I've always disabled archives and never used tags simply to avoid duplicate content so I guess I've always done the right thing for siloing by instinct. About categories I guess the only difference is that in one you have no content only internal linking and in the other you have both content and internal linking.

I guess I agree with you that the second option is obviously better for relevancy but I don't think your category page having content or not affects rankings that much honestly

Click to expand...

spectrejoe said:

So what you're saying is that it isn't a silo structured CMS due to tags + archives & the way categories are structured?

Click to expand...

yes. using WP without finetuning is seriously going to fuckup your ranking. we all been there. get over it.

As promised, folks. I'm finally going to write the new, revised guide to siloing.

This is something none of you will have EVER have seen before.

This has taken one of my sites from *nothing*, brand new, fresh domain to over 23k keywords on semrush in only 8 months. 230 top 3's, 1000 on page 1 and 2500 on page 2. Including keywords with 12k+ search volume in the top 3.

This is absolutely insane, and I really wasn't going to share this, as it's TOO good. I've decided what the heck. I'll share it, because 99% of people won't ever implement it.

I'm going to write it tonight in a fresh thread and I'll link to it here, so keep an eye out.

Really looking forward to the new / updated insight you have. Just launched my new website and trying to build that first traction. I'm in this for the long haul and need to learn as much as possible as fast as possible.