The Ultimate Guide to SEO Siloing - Dominate Google in 2018

Lets say the subsilo is located at mywebsite.com/laptops/small/ and it is a page with a money article. It is supported by 5 articles which are taged in a wp category named "small laptops".

What do you do with a wp category named "small laptops"? Do you noindex it?

Great guide, but few questions though:
1. Do you use sidebar? If yes what do you put there - links/banners to money page or only promotional offers?
2. Do you use menu in header and footer? If yes, is it different for every silo or the same for everything?

splishsplash said:

So on mysite.com at the bottom of the page I'll have a tree structure linking to all the sub-silo pages. This is useful for the user, and for google

Click to expand...

Splishsplash - do you add tree structure manually, use plugin for this or just display blogroll with featured images from appropriate subsilo?

Totally believe it. I have been doing testing over the last several months and truly am starting to believe a well structured on page linking structure which is outright work is better than a site with tons of backlinks. I am watching movement within hours on Google with my site that I don't build links to but only structure internal content very well. I try to model wikipedia like link structure.

thanks for this but I do not 100% understand it. looking forward for the dummy site

also, this is just inner page SEO, right? it makes a lot of difference, it seems. how about offpage SEO, do you need to spend a lot of money in building PBNs for that 12K volume keyword? because that's where the investment goes usually (building PBNs)

Good guide. I'd go bit further and claim that:
- each inner page with positive UX and contextual content makes your domain stronger.
- each page with weak contextual content (example not adding new niche-specific terms, mentioning the same things only and only, not providing new ones) or not contextual at all with weak UX will make your domain weaker.

I'd link first tier HQ articles that make a lot of traffic from homepage. then any new article you want to rank, you just link it from homepage and 1 tier articles. no need to link it from 2 tier and 3/4 tier articles (unless its contextual). this way all the main link juice gets transformed by desired anchors

Guys, how do we rank for both "notebooks" and "laptops"? They both mean the same but words are different.
We obviously cannot create silos for each of them as that would be a silly dup content.

Should we use both words in the titles when optimizing silos and sub-silos pages?

Can you please give some more information about your website that you ranked with this structure:

- how many pages do you have
- how many posts do you have
- what is the approximate average length of post articles
- how much and what quality of backlinks did you build to it
- did you also promote content on social networks
- how did you do a keyword research
- what is the average keyword search volume that you targeted
- what is the average keyword difficulty that you targeted
- what tools did you use to evaluate keyword difficulty
- how did you do on-page optimization
- did you outsource the content and what kind of content quality did you get from the writers

I know it's a lot of questions, but it would help to better understand the effect this kind of SILO structure. To put it in a real world example context.

Regards,
Zatoichi

Good share...very helpful

This is interesting write-up!. I know you are getting a lot of questions here. But I hope mine is simpler to answer.

Does it matter if the keyword is repeated in the url?

Using your laptop example:

mysite.com/laptops/hp/best-hp-laptops
mysite.com/laptops/hp/should-you-buy-hp-laptops-or-not

keyword "hp" and "laptops" are repeated. Won't it be over-optimized? How you do it on your website?

Thanks a heap mate!

lelou00 said:

This is interesting write-up!. I know you are getting a lot of questions here. But I hope mine is simpler to answer.

Does it matter if the keyword is repeated in the url?

Using your laptop example:

mysite.com/laptops/hp/best-hp-laptops
mysite.com/laptops/hp/should-you-buy-hp-laptops-or-not

keyword "hp" and "laptops" are repeated. Won't it be over-optimized? How you do it on your website?

Thanks a heap mate!

Click to expand...

I thought somewhere I read about this topic and it's called "keyword cannibalism"

But for sure, i need detail information about this from OP.

Very interesting read.
I think I found a very succeeding Affiliate Amazon that follows this guide. When I check their sitemap, I found that their category page is listed in both page-sitemap.xml and category-sitemap.xml.

For Example:

domain.com/laptops

This url is listed as Category and Page in Wordpress. How is this possible? So please help me with these questions:

1 - How do you list a post within the page hierarchy (for breadcumb)? Is there any plugin to use for it? As right now, you can only list your posts within category.
2 - Which plugin that allows you editing Category as a Page?

Guys no more searching for silos, if u know who he is, and read about his old thread (I read it in 2016 but didn't fully understand it ), but I know, this is silo Bible, I already saved bookmark for later learning.

Thanks.

Array Experts said:

Hey Mate,

I Have Few Questions About Silo. I Have New Project Ready To Setup I Am Thinking To Build Site In Silo.

My Site Have 4 Main Category

Category 1, Category 2, Category 3, Category 4

And 3 Subcategories In Each Main Category Which Actually A Filter

Category 1 Category 2 Category 3 Category 4
- Subcategory 1.1 - Subcategory 2.1 - Subcategory 3.1 - Post 4.1
- Subcategory 1.2 - Subcategory 2.2 - Subcategory 3.2 - Post 4.2
- Subcategory 1.3 - Subcategory 2.3 - Subcategory 3.3 - Post 4.3
- - Post 1.1 - - Post 2.1 - - Post 3.1


Everything Going Good Till Here

----Confusion Starts Here----

Post 1.1 Related To Each Subcategories (Subcategory 1.1, Subcategory 1.2, Subcategory 1.3) Because Subcategories is Actually Nothing Just A Filter. ( Very Big Ex. E-commerce Site if I Search For I Phone, It Comes Under Following Categories Electronics › Mobiles & Accessories › Smartphones & Basic Mobiles › Smartphones › Apple iPhone. When I Filter By Brand Electronics › Mobiles & Accessories › Smartphones & Basic Mobiles › Smartphones › Apple)

So if I Continue This Than I Have To Put Post 1.1 Into Subcategories.

Site Will Generate 3 Different URL

abc.com/category1/subcategory1.1/post1.1
abc.com/category1/subcategory2.1/post1.1
abc.com/category1/subcategory3.1/post1.1

Confuse A Bit About Silo Lacking Here

This Was One Scenario Have Another Issue After That

Post 1.1 Contain Text Related To Post 2.1 So I Am Thinking To interlink.

But I Think It Will Lack My Silo If Link Post 1.1 To Post 2.1


Overall Now I Totally Confuse How Can Go Ahead

I Am Not Native One So Sorry For My English I Hope It's Understandable.

Thanks!!

Click to expand...

I'm struggling to understand this. PM me your site and I'll advise you in private.

iVision said:

What is the website also has desktops and mobile phones? Do we just create yoursite.com/desktops/ and yoursite.com/mobilephones/ silos and the same logic follows? On the homepage we then link to ALL pages (or 20 latest) from yoursite.com/laptops/, ALL pages from yoursite.com/desktops/ and ALL pages from yoursite.com/mobilephones/ ?

As for tree structure at the bottom of the pages, can you please show some real examples? What are they "tree structures" on the website?

Click to expand...

yoursite.com/tech/computers/desktops
yoursite.com/tech/mobile

But it depends on the size. If yoursite.com IS a tech site, you don't need the tech silo.

iVision said:

So we don't create silos for type/size/specs but rather choose one silo (brand as in your example) and type/size/specs would be pages within a silo?

For example,
yoursite.com/laptops/hp/hp-xx-green.html
yoursite.com/laptops/hp/hp-14inch.html
yoursite.com/laptops/hp/hp-xx-i5-16gb.html
yoursite.com/laptops/hp/hp-xx-i5-SSD.html

Did I understand it correctly or not?

Click to expand...

No don't have dup pages like that

You use an ajax filter on the page. So displaying all the hp laptops in laptops/hp, the user will have a box at the left usually to filter by price, specs etc. That's standard in all ecommerce platforms

Zatoichi said:

Lets say the subsilo is located at mywebsite.com/laptops/small/ and it is a page with a money article. It is supported by 5 articles which are taged in a wp category named "small laptops".

What do you do with a wp category named "small laptops"? Do you noindex it?

Click to expand...

You wouldn't ever have a silo called small. Your silos should be actual topics and brands. Laptops, tech, mobile, iphone, tablets. For other niches, chairs, dining, kitchen, blenders, cutlery, fashion, shoes, boots, gaming, xbox, playstation, 360, xbox one and so on.

RayBay said:

Great guide, but few questions though:
1. Do you use sidebar? If yes what do you put there - links/banners to money page or only promotional offers?
2. Do you use menu in header and footer? If yes, is it different for every silo or the same for everything?

Click to expand...

I don't do super tight silos myself. In my sidebar I just use a related posts plugin. What's more important is your physical and virtual silo. Having links in the sidebar to other places makes no difference at all. It's MUCH better for the user and for reducing bounce rate to do that.

RayBay said:

Splishsplash - do you add tree structure manually, use plugin for this or just display blogroll with featured images from appropriate subsilo?

Click to expand...

Yep, manually.

janeeth20 said:

thanks for this but I do not 100% understand it. looking forward for the dummy site

also, this is just inner page SEO, right? it makes a lot of difference, it seems. how about offpage SEO, do you need to spend a lot of money in building PBNs for that 12K volume keyword? because that's where the investment goes usually (building PBNs)

Click to expand...

You'll get 10x the results from your off-page with a proper silo setup. I'd go so far as to say that if you haven't set your on-page properly no matter how much you spend you're going to get crap results. Within reason of course. If you spend $50k on link building you're going to get amazing rankings, but, with the right on-page that $50k could have been $5k.

aidenhera said:

Good guide. I'd go bit further and claim that:
- each inner page with positive UX and contextual content makes your domain stronger.
- each page with weak contextual content (example not adding new niche-specific terms, mentioning the same things only and only, not providing new ones) or not contextual at all with weak UX will make your domain weaker.

I'd link first tier HQ articles that make a lot of traffic from homepage. then any new article you want to rank, you just link it from homepage and 1 tier articles. no need to link it from 2 tier and 3/4 tier articles (unless its contextual). this way all the main link juice gets transformed by desired anchors

Click to expand...

There's no article linking. It's silo linking.

So site.com/tech/laptops/hp/some-hp-laptop-vs-another will appear on

site.com
site.com/tech
site.com/tech/laptops
site.com/tech/laptops/hp

It's virtually silo'd in each, and it's physically in tech/laptops/hp

This isn't really how most people talk about siloing. Forget everything you've ever read about siloing. This is the way to do it if you want the results. The only thing you need to be doing is making it easy for google to understand all the topics on your site and building topical authority, that's why you want the hp comparison article appearing on the site.com/tech

iVision said:

Guys, how do we rank for both "notebooks" and "laptops"? They both mean the same but words are different.
We obviously cannot create silos for each of them as that would be a silly dup content.

Should we use both words in the titles when optimizing silos and sub-silos pages?

Click to expand...

You wouldn't create separate pages. You would target them both using your title/h1

Your title might be "Laptops for sale | yoursite.com"

and your h1

"The Latest Laptops and Notebooks"

Zatoichi said:

Can you please give some more information about your website that you ranked with this structure:

- how many pages do you have
- how many posts do you have
- what is the approximate average length of post articles
- how much and what quality of backlinks did you build to it
- did you also promote content on social networks
- how did you do a keyword research
- what is the average keyword search volume that you targeted
- what is the average keyword difficulty that you targeted
- what tools did you use to evaluate keyword difficulty
- how did you do on-page optimization
- did you outsource the content and what kind of content quality did you get from the writers

I know it's a lot of questions, but it would help to better understand the effect this kind of SILO structure. To put it in a real world example context.

Regards,
Zatoichi

Click to expand...

A lot of questions!

I have 300 indexed pages. No posts.

Average is about 1700 words. Some are up to 8k words. Depends on the volume/commercial potential.

Backlinks are my wolf network and charity links.

I do manual social to it with my agency's in-house staff.

Keyword volume varies. I target everything from 300 to 30k. Most about 700-3k

There's no average. Some are low comp, some medium, some high. I target everything.

I only evaluate the on-page targeting, so I look at page 1. I look to see who is targeting the phrase primarily, and who is ranking from a secondary targeting.

How I did on-page optimization is a bit of a big question. I'll write more about this in future guides. But keep your 2-keyword density < 2% and 3-keyword density < 1.5% and don't over optimize h2's and h3's, and don't use more than 1 h1.

Yeah, I didn't do the content myself. I have staff and freelancers for that. It's high quality content.

lelou00 said:

This is interesting write-up!. I know you are getting a lot of questions here. But I hope mine is simpler to answer.

Does it matter if the keyword is repeated in the url?

Using your laptop example:

mysite.com/laptops/hp/best-hp-laptops
mysite.com/laptops/hp/should-you-buy-hp-laptops-or-not

keyword "hp" and "laptops" are repeated. Won't it be over-optimized? How you do it on your website?

Thanks a heap mate!

Click to expand...

In general, yes, ie, don't have things like bestlaptops.com/laptops/best-laptops-2017

But for a silo structure it wouldn't make sense to have laptops/hp/best.html, lol

You have to say best-hp-laptops.html, so don't worry about it. Just don't do stuff like laptops/hp-laptops/ etc.

A visual representation is the best for these types of threads.

I kinda get what your saying and trying to implement it on a site now and I have a few questions.

So my topics should be manually created pages for example.

mysite.com/xbox

Then if I want anything under that I would create an actually category called xbox-1 (Since my category and manually created pages will have the same slug if i don't change it to something else)

This new post would be called games which will be under the category xbox-1. So it would be mysite.com/xbox-1/games.

Then I hyperlink the post in the manually created xbox page

From what I can tell the only way to use the earlier plugin you mentioned is to create post instead of pages but the way how your describing everything it sounds like you want us to create pages instead.

So my questions are:

1. Do we index the category in yoast
2. Do we keep the category in the url slug
3. You keep mentioning showing the 20 most recent articles on the manually created pages (categories) but then your saying using Ajax to display unlimited articles. ( This part is a bit confusing to me, can you expound on this if possible )

i use wordpress and implement like this is so hard. don't know how to code. and i want to link pillar post to another post that contain the same word on the title. that's it.

We have been designing lots of websites with just services pages and not to next level (why, Support etc.), Well, absolutely "Silo Method", makes sense the way you have explained in easy way. We will try it on our own websites first before we implement it on client's websites.

Many thanks.

just wack a simple website together so we can all understand this please....

to me it like you just using categories and sub categories and articles off them .....


can you just make something up stupid so we understand..

is this the link structure?
website
website/tv
website/tv/jvc
website/tv/panasonic
website/tv/samsung

cheers....

Very informative post. It is difficult to & implement this structure for existing sites. One more thing which way is better to create silo with pages or with posts in wordpress

Excellent. I thought a 300-word post was seen as thin content but your results prove otherwise with the silo's, Awesome