Tom Belfort's AMA about SEO/Siloing/PBNs/Link Building 2019+

Dark Sky said:
1 Silo at a time. This makes it more efficient to rank. You will get an ROI faster.

The more posts in your silo, the stronger all the posts in that silo become for ranking. If you distribute it efforts across multiple silos at once, you just end up with a ton of weak posts until you manage to fill all the silos. Fill 1 silo at a time, and while your doing the 2nd silo, your first one will be earning you cash.
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This post is absolutely right on point. Short and true answer that all newbies must read to get succes on niche sites.
 
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I was thinking that I can have a silo for the types of piano. And then its children would be "Grand piano", etc etc.

I guess I'll have to make separate silos for each type if I decide to choose a niche which is as broad as piano.

Or maybe just cover one type at first and then later when I have decent authority, I'll expand to the other types as well?

I'll see which one seems better. Niche selection is tough af for sure.
 
Deepesh Sharma said:
I was thinking that I can have a silo for the types of piano. And then its children would be "Grand piano", etc etc.

I guess I'll have to make separate silos for each type if I decide to choose a niche which is as broad as piano.

Or maybe just cover one type at first and then later when I have decent authority, I'll expand to the other types as well?

I'll see which one seems better. Niche selection is confusing af
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One step at a time mate.

Make sure you can rank a child silo, before even considering a parent silo.
 
Dark Sky said:
One step at a time mate.

Make sure you can rank a child silo, before even considering a parent silo.
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Aaah. I've got some serious research and learning to do before I get practical with the structuring.

Thanks for the help though.
 
Dark Sky said:
For the permalink customizer, do you set the structure at %category% and then 301 redirect the categories to the L1, L2, L3 pages?

If not, how do you set the permalink structure up with your silo method?
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Hey bro, can I ask how u solve this problem? Do u really do 301? still confused me now.

thanks a lot
 
splishsplash said:
since you can't have 2 categories with the same name. The category hierarchy is not recognized as a hierarchy internally.

Note, that, even if your category name is "animals", and your category permalink is %category%, wordpress will choose the page with the same name before the category.
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No mate, if category and page are the same names, same slug, WordPress will show category first over the page.
 
seowarrior008 said:
No mate, if category and page are the same names, same slug, WordPress will show category first over the page.
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Yes i agree, but when doing page 301 to category and users clikc the category it will be riderected to the page. In this case should should i nofollow the category or index it?
 
Abdullah Prem said:
Yes i agree, but when doing page 301 to category and users clikc the category it will be riderected to the page. In this case should should i nofollow the category or index it?
[
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Why u do page 301 to the category?

U need silo pages, not a category, so if do 301, should redirect the category to the page.

For post category, I think u can leave them noindex but follow.

What confused me is if I should keep "category" in slug? if i keep it, then permanlink like this
domain.com/category/animals,
your silo page is domain.com/animals, obviously, i think u should do 301

if u remove it, then permanlink like this
domain.com/animals, then ur silo page is also the same,
domain.com/animals.

In such case, wordpress will show category first over ur silo page.

Correct me plz, if anywhere wrong i said.
and looking to the opimized solution.

thanks Tom for great guide!
 
seowarrior008 said:
if u remove it, then permanlink like this
domain.com/animals, then ur silo page is also the same,
domain.com/animals.
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yes i am thinking the same. I think tom is suggesting to do page silo instead of catefory silos/

But if do page silo what about category? shoud we neglect it ? i am confused as you mate
 
Eventually, my product is us based one. But my website is hosted in German ip. My backlinks are mostly from German ip website, those are us based traffic websites Is it affect my ranking in us region?

Your opinion?
 
Deepesh Sharma said:
Hey @splishsplash , don't know if you will still reply to this thread but I just had a question related to siloing a new site.

I'll use the health niche as an example. Let's say I have 4 silos on the site.

https://healthsite.com/fat-losshttps://healthsite.com/strengh-traininghttps://healthsite.com/dietinghttps://healthsite.com/silo4
Now the thing is if I write the content myself, the frequency of the posts will be slow. So, according to you, should I try to build one silo first (say strength training) and keep the others empty (as this will increase the silo relevancy in the eyes of Google)?

Or should I add an equal amount of posts in each one of them?

If I focus on 1 silo in the start, I will be able to create better relevancy for strength training, and maybe I'll start ranking for strength training keywords.

On the other hand, adding content on each silo at the same time will result in lower relevancy within the silos (because of less content in each silo).

What are your thoughts on this? Do correct me if I'm wrong.

And thanks for the amazing threads on this forum, I learned a lot of stuff from you.

Waiting for your response.
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I dont think you need a lot of content on each silo . You can put dieting and fat loss under 1 slug
 
Hola @splishsplash, I didn't get any answers to my thread then I started search bhw, and I saw your AMA thread. I'm honestly happy that I found this thread now.

I'm trying to explain as much as I can possible about this scenario. Kindly give me an answer.

This is my site structure that I'm gonna start. It's a WP site.

And I linked it like this with using silo structure. As a example I only created interlink levels in No 4 level only.

silo3.png


Is this linking is correct?

Have a home page with over 2000+ hq article.

A and B is my main Silo pages

page 1 2 3 4 and again 1 2 3 is 2nd level silo pages.

1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a are child posts.

I have main download button in the main menu and I mention it in this diagram also, but it linked to another website, it's subdomain actually download.exmple.com like that. and it's a html website. I add no follow attribute to that outer link.


Summary in above linked example:

Home page > Page A > Page 4 > ( 4-a, 4-b, 4-c, 4-d, etc..)


I didn't created categories, I create pages only for to create this silo structure.

As example I'm getting similar names to this to show you what I did:

domain name is mycatordogworld.com

Home page about pets. (2000+ hq article.)

Crated page A about cats (1500+ hq article)

The page 4 is about cat foods (1500+ hq article)

Page 4-a is about Purina Pro ( 700+ hq article)
Page 4-b is about Meow Mix (700+ hq article)
etc


I've linked like this.

In 4-a page I have selected cat foods page as parent page. In Cat food page I have selected cats as my parent page.

So my final url structure is like this.

mycatordogworld.com/cats/foods/purina-pro
mycatordogworld.com/cats/foods/meow-mix


Is this a correct way to create a silo structure? I didn't used categories because these all are pages. didn't used any posts in wp, just used pages only.


What should I do for this dear @splishsplash
 
Thanks for the excellent guide and for the patience to answer everyone's questions in this thread.

I would have one question for you as well, seeing that many people recommend to go for People Also Ask questions as a base for blog posts (see Income School guides and journeys in BHW on that).
I have a script that scrapes those questions and it would be easy for me to write articles around them.
In this thread you can see what's all about.

So, how would you deal with these questions, in the context of a siloed website?

A. Create an 500 words article around one question
B. Create an 1000 to 5000 words article that covers 3-4 questions
C. Create a huge post of >5000 words answering everything on that topic

I assume is not C, I'm oscillating between A and B, and probably it depends a lot on the topic, but I'd really wanna know your take on this.

PS. If you look at text files generated in the thread linked above, you can easily notice some questions are very-very similar. From the start, i would pick just one of them to answer, probably the most naturally-looking, and expect Google to know that the answer is relevant also for the variations.
 
splishsplash said:
Ok, so now we've got animals/cats/siamese/article-name. These aren't categories. They do not exist just now. They're just a permalink structure. They have NOTHING to do with the post categories we created above. We will have a use for those later.
Click to expand...

Why these are not categories? In step B you made those categories. You've created these categories above? don't you?

splishsplash said:
f) Create a PAGE 'animals'
g) Create a page 'cats', make its parent page 'animals'. (You do this on the right in the editor, "page attributes"->"parent page")
h) Create a page 'siamese', make its parent page 'cats'.
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You didn't mention about editing permalink structure here like did in that Step E??

You said above to create the pages with adding parent attribute.

But when we start to browse those like this..

ex: Let say I'm going to see animals page, now I see animal page and down below all other posts as you said by adding that (not mentioned)plugin.

Next I'm going to browse animals/cats page. then I see the cats page. and below as you said related category posts.

but....

the permalink structure you forgot to mention here.

example.com/animal/cat

this is the correct way it must look in url, when we browsing, but when we actually try to load this...

it return to...

exmple.com/cat

this's wrong.

add that part to the steps, you forgot to mention that in the post.
 
splishsplash said:
f) Create a PAGE 'animals'
g) Create a page 'cats', make its parent page 'animals'. (You do this on the right in the editor, "page attributes"->"parent page")
h) Create a page 'siamese', make its parent page 'cats'.
Click to expand...

What is permelink structure for these pages when browsing? What we should see in url?

when we browsing animal page url example.com/anilmals

No problem with that. But need to know this

Is it when we browsing cats page url is it...

exmple.com/animals/cats or example.com/cats

what's the correct permalink structure for these pages?

You didn't mention this in the post.
 
I don't know why so many people have issues to understand this guide, which is genius, and like all genius stuff, is dead simple.
Do you know E=mc² ? It's so simple, yet it has so deep implications in our lives and it changed forever our understanding about the world.
Let me explain what I understood from @splishsplash and what I know already.

What do I know for sure?

Wordpress "should" have a category page, which contains a description and a list of all posts in that category. However, not every theme out there supports that setup or maybe it does, but not the way you like it.
Many e-commerce themes have this feature, other e-commerce platforms have this (I am sure about Prestashop but probably all do).

Keep this in mind for a minute and let's move on to what Tom said.

Basically, the key point in siloing is to split your main topic in subtopics, in such way that Google can crawl and understand you website easily.

My addition to help you with that, ask yourself "What type of..?"
Taking from his example:

Main topic:
  1. Animals

What type of animals?
1.Cats
What type of cats?
1.1 Siamese
1.2 Persian
2. Dogs
What type of dogs?
2.1 Akita
2.2 Bulldog
2.3 Chihuahua

Ok, if you want, you can add more just by asking this question, hope you got the point. No "reviews", no "guides" as you can't answer to "What type of dog?" with "review".
It's more complex than that, depending on the topic, but this is for starters, to understand this stuff more easily.
LE. I think you need to know how narrow a subtopic can be. If you can't write at least 10-15 unique articles in a subcategory, is not worth narrowing down and whatever you will write should belong to parent.
Example:
Siamese Cats
One could write a few articles about them
Siamese Cats in San Francisco
This is an article, maybe (just maybe) 2, you can't have much content on this topic to split it in 10-15 articles.
That's a good rule of thumb, i guess.

Now, coming back to technical stuff, you need to make these topics and subtopics as categories and subcategories in your WordPress.
First, what I'd do, i would go to settings/permalinks and change what's there with:
Code: 
/%category%/%postname%/
Probably not quite necessary, but I'm sure it worked in my case.
Make category "animal", then "dogs" and "cats", both with parent "animal" (aka subcategory)
Then you create more, the subtopics above become categories (subcategories actually, with their respective parents setup).

Coming back to what I said first, you need to have category pages, listing the posts in that category.

From Tom's guide, you don't need to rely on WordPress's ability to do it.
So, install the permalink customizer plugin and some other to list posts on pages.
Now, without doing anything else, add pages for every topic and subtopic, just like you did for categories. The same setup for parent pages is valid also here.
Add page "Animals" , no parent, add short description as instructed in guide.
Add page "Dogs", parent "Animals", add short description...
And so on.

Issues.
If you setup everything as above, you shouldn't have any. But if you have, it's most likely with permalink structure. When you create pages, look at the permalink box and verify everything is ok, you can type in there and change it if the plugin didn't pick it up correctly.

It's done. Your urls should look like this now
site.com/animals/dogs/akita/review-akita
Your menus should be set to reflect this tree structure as well.
That's all
 
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Hi everybody,
Thank the author very much. The article is really helpful.

I followed the author's instructions in 2017 and had some success. My website is well developed. Traffic per day about 8k-15k per day.

Currently I am building a new website according to the instructions of this article. Hope good results.!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
thienthan said:
Hi everybody,
Thank the author very much. The article is really helpful.

I followed the author's instructions in 2017 and had some success. My website is well developed. Traffic per day about 8k-15k per day.

Currently I am building a new website according to the instructions of this article. Hope good results.!
Click to expand...
you used pages?
not posts?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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