question about physical silo

Hi, I have a question, is physical silo outdated in 2021?

A single post may fit different categories/topics. It might be a struggle to name the physical silo for a single topic.

For example, my post is about pet food for dogs and cats. and I have two main categories with /dog and /cat but without a category like /petfood.

So how can I properly physically siloing the url? under /dog or /cat?

Is putting every post under the root domain without category a good idea and siloing them virtually by interlinking?

I assume that is an example, but dogs and cats do not eat the same pet food.

If you break topics into silos, you are doing that in order to help Google catagorize your site and help customers navigate.

There isn't much point in making siloed categories if you are not going to keep them separate for the most part.

Why have a category for cats and a category for dogs and then write articles :
Pet food for cats and dogs
Pet beds for cats and dogs
Cat and dog toys
Behavioral problems of dogs and cats

Plan your topics then build content accordingly.

There may be some crossover but it should be minor.

If you are finding a lot of topics like your pet food example and those listed above then you have done a poor job choosing silos or you have done a poor job creating content for those silos.

Why did you create a silo for cats and a silo for dogs when the content is combining those topics? Better to have an article "Healthy food for cats" and "Best dry dog food"

There is no "physical" silo. The silo is created with categories and tags (in WP). Any article can be assigned multiple tags and categories. All the content, tags, categories, etc is stored in the WP database and parsed by PHP code when called for rendering by a browser. No physical silo.

In your example, add category "cats" and "dogs" to the article and it will show up in both silos. Not really a problem unless you have too much crossover content.

So do this for the occasional article that fits in both. But if that happens too often then there is probably an issue with how you have designed your content or you are not properly creating content according to your design plan.

Just create category as
Pet food
Pet toys
Physical needs and so on

then create sub category as Cats and Dogs.

Better arrange your content about what areas to cover and finalize your main category. Those category fits in the main home page, will look elegant. whatever @RRunner say also good to see.

RRunner said:

I assume that is an example, but dogs and cats do not eat the same pet food.

If you break topics into silos, you are doing that in order to help Google catagorize your site and help customers navigate.

There isn't much point in making siloed categories if you are not going to keep them separate for the most part.

Why have a category for cats and a category for dogs and then write articles :
Pet food for cats and dogs
Pet beds for cats and dogs
Cat and dog toys
Behavioral problems of dogs and cats

Plan your topics then build content accordingly.

There may be some crossover but it should be minor.

If you are finding a lot of topics like your pet food example and those listed above then you have done a poor job choosing silos or you have done a poor job creating content for those silos.

Why did you create a silo for cats and a silo for dogs when the content is combining those topics? Better to have an article "Healthy food for cats" and "Best dry dog food"

There is no "physical" silo. The silo is created with categories and tags (in WP). Any article can be assigned multiple tags and categories. All the content, tags, categories, etc is stored in the WP database and parsed by PHP code when called for rendering by a browser. No physical silo.

In your example, add category "cats" and "dogs" to the article and it will show up in both silos. Not really a problem unless you have too much crossover content.

So do this for the occasional article that fits in both. But if that happens too often then there is probably an issue with how you have designed your content or you are not properly creating content according to your design plan.

Click to expand...

Hi thank you for your insightful reply!

Frankly I know how to set up silo and how to assign and write posts according to topics, maybe I'm no expert but I know some basics.

Maybe I set up the wrong example.

Let me rephrase my question.

The physical and virtual siloing I'm referring to is https://www.bruceclay.com/seo/siloing/

For a clearer example:

my site is abc.com. I have a category /dog. I'm wrting a post about best dog food.

1）So if I assign permalink with category, then the url be like:

abc.com/dog/best-dog-food

Click to expand...

Then let's call it a "physical siloing"

2） If I assign permalink w/o category, then the url be like:

abc.com/best-dog-food

Click to expand...

I've seen many websites don't use category in their url, for whatever reason(fewer clicks to get to post, seo, etc..).

But I also think silo is super important to group similar topics.

So my question is, can I safely abandon physical silo like scenario 1 and use virtual silo like interlinking similar topics to achieve the same result like physical silo?

So all my posts will be under root domain and I can silo them by interlinking to their category page without adding real category prefix in the url.

Silo is great, but if I have a general post that I want to assign to many different categories, then category prefix in the url can be a problem and confusing.

Correct me if I'm wrong, thanks!

jaerehan said:

Just create category as
Pet food
Pet toys
Physical needs and so on

then create sub category as Cats and Dogs.

Better arrange your content about what areas to cover and finalize your main category. Those category fits in the main home page, will look elegant. whatever @RRunner say also good to see.

Click to expand...

Hi, my problem is that I cannot finalize the main categories too soon, I'm entering a new niche and still learning. I can expect many changes in categories when I've learned more. So I prefer to have no category prefix to easily switch and make changes to categories in future without affecting post pages url and unnecessary 301s.

If you search BHW for "silos" you can find guides and discussions. I would not say I'm an expert.

Some discussions are about the physical silo model being out of date. That seems to be your original question.

Reading the article you linked to he describes physical silos as the folder structure holding your content. Set up that way, the silo structure is visible in the url. The structure also needs to be maintained by links from article pages to category pages.

With a cms like wp, the same content can be linked to by multiple urls using tags and categories.

Using your example:

The article is

It falls under multiple categories and therefore different urls all point at the same piece of content

You don't want Google to see each of those urls as a different piece of content (duplicate content) so you use canonical settings (built into wp) to tell Google these are all pointing to the same article.

I think this is why the idea of physical silos is obsolete. In a virtual silo design with a cms, the same content can appear in multiple silos without confusing Google or ruining the silo structure.

In your original post, it would be perfectly acceptable and not confusing to Google to have the article appear under both "cats" and "dogs"

URL structure does not really matter from SEO point of view,
what you should be carrying about is the internal linking structure built using such categories (& subs ofc)