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

rajsinhahyd said:

how did u manage to display thumbnails for pages?

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testartestar said:

Awesome AMA! I've gone through half of it over a gallon of coffee, and now I'm working on implementing it on a brand new website I am working on.

I'm struggling to get the permalink structure to work correctly. I created the following post categories:
L1 -- Kitchen
L2 -- Coffeemachines
L2 -- Cookware
L3 -- Frying pans
L4 -- Pots
I've set the slug to the same as the name of the category, and the parent category to the corresponding category in the above level.

I've then created pages with the following permalinks. I assigned the parent category same as the categories
/kitchen/coffeemachines
/kitchen/cookware
/kitchen/cookware/fryingpans
/kitchen/cookware/pots

I created 5 posts for coffeemachines, and they work well. The url looks like this:
/kitchen/coffeemachines/perculators
/kitchen/coffeemachines/espressomachines
/kitchen/coffeemachines/coffeemakers
/kitchen/coffeemachines/french-press

However, for the posts in the frying-pans category, /kitchen doesn't show, so it's just /cookware/fryingpans/teflonpan I've made sure to assign "kitchen" correctly in the permalink of the posts, however when I press "Regenerate permalink" and refresh the edit page, the "kitchen" is gone.


I also have an issue in which the content I add to the pages doesn't get shown. Instead I get sent to the category-archive for that specific category.

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testartestar said:

I wish I cold still edit this.

I assume the problem comes from my category-page and and pages having the same url. I tried changing the category-page and then doing redirects but this leads to the breadcrumb not working properly. How should the url/slugs be named for the categories/pages? I followed along in this post: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/t...bns-link-building-2019.1151635/#post-12358498 but I can't get it to work properly.

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thienthan said:

Try this:
1, Setting -> Permalink: Custom Structure: /% category% /% postname% /
2, Yoast Seo -> Advanced -> Permalink. In the item
Strip the category base (usually / category /) from the category URL: Please select "Keep".

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testartestar said:

Alright, I got all of my urls to look good with this method. The breadcrumbs are still leading to the /category page though. I assume that's not the way it should be set up?

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thienthan said:

The problem with BreadCrumb, you have to deal with it. Nothing is ready-to-eat.
Otherwise do it my way. Follow the OP's way and use Custom Permalink Plugin.

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thienthan said:

The problem with BreadCrumb, you have to deal with it. Nothing is ready-to-eat.
Otherwise do it my way. Follow the OP's way and use Custom Permalink Plugin.

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Larry Igna said:

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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Abdullah Prem said:

i understand up to this. but what about page vs category page?

Page slug looks like domain.com/animan/cat
category slug also looks like domain.com/anmal/cat

when i write something in animal page and cat page and plublish it. After viewing it nothing shows cause wordpress automaticaloy category page and page about animal and cats are hidden..

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thienthan said:

Think of ways to solve the problem you are having. Rather than mechanically applying what is instructed.
- Do it my way or follow the OP's way, you're almost there. Just a little bit more.
- Solve the problem yourself without being taught your own way.


See demo 2 versions:
- Silo 2018, 100% Page: vinagamemobile.com
- Silo 2019, user Page and Post: You may have seen it, so I corrected it.. I don't want to go public right now

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philoxy said:

One option could be hosting a blog on a subdomain?

blog.name.com

If I do that, I should easily be able to do the SILOing right? Would a subdomain be an issue for SEO?

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