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:
- 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:
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