Sorry for being unresponsive. After not having an answer for almost a day, I stopped watching the thread. I hope though to get some interesting details out of this discussion.
My niche is Outdoors stuff. The site is an Amazon site with articles that I group by theme under one category or another. I'm using Wordpress, and I use category pages as the main silo page, and posts pages as the children.
The question is basically this: does it make any sense to have silos deeper than parent + direct children? Because thematically, I can group a few 2-level silos under one main silo to make 3-level silos. But if I do that, would I have to reflect that in the URL structure of each page, for instance for a level 3 page, should I have a URL like domain.com/top-parent/sub-parent/child-page ?
I'm basically curious to know if that deep URL structure is necessary. Because in the theory of silos, the URL structure seems to be reflecting the directory tree on the disk. I'm asking because I don't have experience with this, I just read on the subject and started applying what I read.
I already have one 2-level silo on my site, with the silo page being a category page, and the children pages having URLs like: domain.com/category/child (2 levels deep). I should probably ask first if it's alright to have 2-level URLs like that, and only then if I should go 3 levels deep in them URLs.
And since you guys are saying that silos vary with niches, I would find it helpful to get some examples. This would also be profitable for people in other niches who come across this thread.
First off a great example of siloing is amazon its self. Its confusing as f_+_ but its there.
The general consensus is to go 2 level deeps but if for your site would benefit from 3 then go for it. Balancing user experience with siloing can be a bit tricky. So if adding the third level will help then why the hell not.
I find there levels works best for me in amazon style review sites. But these wouldnt be micro niches, these would be considered authority?
This is an example site build I might use for a broad tech review site:
teir 1 - techsite.com/
main page would be a list of all broad categories i review. Lets sets say i have 5 categories cell phones, phablets, mp3 players, guitars, alarm clock
tier 2 - techsite.com/phones
This would be a category page with a article at top and a lits below of reviews for that category. I like to use blog format so the page is ever changing.
this would link to my money articles for example in phones it would be like: 10 ten phones for porn, best selling phones in china, my phone is purple, phones are neat.
tier 3 - techsite.com/phones/top-10-phones-for-porn/
this would be the big money article talk about the best ten phones. I would write a small review for every phone kind like 10tenreveiws does and that would take them to the 4th tierr and thous would be a more in depth explanation of that phone or whatever.
So if its a top ten site I would have 10 500 word articles linking to the tier 3 main review page.
tier 4 - techsite.com/phones/top-10-phones-for-porn/note4
already explained above but then I can also dump more articles in here about more porn phones if I want, who cares really. But it helps IMO.
I like this set up, because it gives me more space to expand my silo and many levels to dump articles if I want.
