Yoast Cornerstone Content

While reading the Yoast guide to cornerstone content, they recommend linking out from smaller less informative blog posts to your "main" or "cornerstone" blog post on the subject. They don't say much of anything about linking out from your cornerstone post.

However after reading a few other websites view on the subject they suggest that your cornerstone piece to link out to all of your smaller and less informative sub articles.

Just wanted to get BHW's thoughts on the matter. Wouldn't a bunch of links from my cornerstone post to 7 or 8 of my smaller posts dilute the value of the cornerstone piece?

On the other hand, I can see from a user experience why linking out would be valuable to the reader.

So if your cornerstone post is about "Cars", your sub posts might be about sports cars, sedans, pickup trucks, SUV's, electric cars, hybrids etc..

For those that use cornerstone pieces successfully, how do you go about it? and yay or nay regarding links from the cornerstone piece to the sub posts and vice versa?

both of the statements are relatively correct, your main articles should receive a good number of internal links to drive some link juice and help them to rank,
On the other hand, you can link to some relevant minor posts from your main posts,

in your example above, you can link to the "cars" post from any other posts ("vehicles", "planes", "tractors", etc...), from the minor posts and wherever it fit,
while you link to some cars from that same post,

so ideally, it will receive more internal links than other posts but doesn't mean you can't link out from it

Follow up question.

Long form content seems to matter But should the long form content be focused on the cornerstone content?
In other words can and should the supporting content be shorter. Sometimes its tough to get 1000+ words in about a sub topic but I still would like it to have a chance to rank

In ideal case, you should link cornerstone content from 20+ smaller posts, and create links to around 8 posts from cornerstone content. You should also have social shares and niche-relevant backlinks to your cornerstone content. It's not about what is more important to you as a webmaster but it defines the hierarchy of your site.

In ideal case, you should link cornerstone content from 20+ smaller posts, and create links to around 8 posts from cornerstone content. You should also have social shares and niche-relevant backlinks to your cornerstone content. It's not about what is more important to you as a webmaster but it defines the hierarchy of your site.

Click to expand...

The smaller articles, how many words do you shoot for?

The Cornerstone technique is actually based on one algorithm update that Google did several years back.

A lot of SEO analysts called the update the “Hilltop” update.

The idea is that certain sites become hubs of information. They link out to other sites because they know that's where a good page is.

And when you look at these posts, they are valuable because people who have no idea about the niche or don't know where to start can just look up these pages and confidently click through to get to the good stuff.

So these are called hub pages.

Google rewards these in its algorithm because, basically, you are acting like some sort of librarian or curator.

You're not going to link to garbage, so you're going to come up with this nice list going to third-party sites.

The same principle can apply to your internal linking structure.

So you may have tons of stuff talking about many different topics, but you can make your users’ life so much easier by creating posts that link to your good stuff, and you do the analysis and the categorization for them.

So yes, I think the Cornerstone content model works if you are going to be linking out to high-quality content that is related to your niche.