Common SEO advice is that internal links are powerful. But how powerful exactly? If internal links are only 1/10th as powerful as external links then perhaps a better use of one's time, energy and resources should be used in building external links.
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Silo-ing is a real pet project of mine. I am a silo advocate. If you are building a site architecture, I recommend silo-ing. The thing to keep in mind in silo-ing is say you have yoursite.com/targetpage and by target page is what you are trying to rank for a specific keyword and you want that page to show in organic results.
How you silo that is most often through a blog but it could also be done through pages but in this scenario it would be through a blog. You would have mysite.com/targetpage/nameofblogpost so that URL structure for that blogpost contains the target page and then it contains a link on that blog post going to that target page. That is called a virtual silo and it does not need a child-parent relationship to do that and you could handle it through your blog.
There is a little bit of tagging expertise to it but it is not too terribly tricky. That is what we are talking about here when it comes to silo-ing. The yoursite.com/targetpage should contain your keyword. So, if you are selling red bicycles it would be yoursite.com/redbicycles and then you’ve got your content that supports that page and you might have yoursite.com/redbicycles/5tipstofindthebestredbicycles and that is the post that you have written about red bicycles and in the URL structure, you could see that the red bicycles page is in that URL and there is also a link going from that page to the top level page.
What is really awesome in this test is we were testing just a Google doc link. We were pitting internal links against a Google doc because we know that passes juice and it is probably in the lower end if we have a baseline of which passes juice. It would probably be the Google doc just on its own.
You haven’t blasted any links to it and you haven’t done anything else to it. It is just something that we know passes juice. Google doc is something at the bottom of the scale in terms of power. We also know that the DA (pick your metric) is very high but we know it is a baseline link.
We learned that two silo’d links beat the baseline link. So, that is two posts properly silo’d and linking back to a target page will beat one baseline link. This is exciting because when you think about building even a Google stack, there is more effort that goes into that than building a couple of blog posts.
Your own site or your client’s site probably have a lot of unutilized blog posts that aren’t properly silo’d and they aren’t properly linking somewhere. You can immediately get an equivalent link juice pass just by reorganizing your site.
Last year, I talked about this in SEORockstar where I silo’d a site with three years worth of blog posts that were really well-written posts. I silo’d them all and pointed them to the proper pages and did some on page optimization and I got first page rankings out of it. That is when I realized that silo-ing is a very powerful thing.
How many Google Docs do you build from one Gmail account?
If I am pointing them to my money site, I only do one. I use one Google doc from one Gmail account and I do not use it again.
Can you set up a silo on an old site without changing the URLs?
From a WordPress perspective, you have to change the slug – that little piece past the .com. You could still point from a random page in but that random page, if it doesn’t have the target URL page in it, it is unsilo’d at that point. In this test, Ryan did that and it is just not effective.
What if someone wants to look at your posts and your categories?
What I do when I set this up is my next and previous stay within one category. Say, when they click next, usually in that scenario, you would go to the next most recent post based on time. In this, I would send them to the next most recent post in this category.
Dori: You do this manually right? It automatically goes by date in WordPress
Yes, that is correct and WordPress does not automatically categorize by pages. What I did was build a plugin for this. You can then categorize the pages and match the slug so that when you click in the post, this category goes to this category and it matches up and points correctly to your target page.
The only URLs that I would change would be supporting content pages. I wouldn’t go in and change a top level page that is currently ranking for something. Where you would look at changing the URL structure is in your blog section or your supporting content pages.
The reason is when most people write a blog, they are writing great content about the things that they do or the things that they sell and you have to kind of cross your fingers that Google makes the connection between this content and that page.
What you would do in a silo is remove the mystery for Google and let it know that this page is supported by this piece of content. That is what the silo structure does so that when Google crawls through those folders, it would crawl through your target page and then get to the supporting content and then there is a link from that content going to your target page. It creates a silo which is a contained environment.
The idea is that Google would just crawl around that particular category seeing all those content. For Google then to go to the next target page in that site, it has to crawl up and out of the silo.
On an e-com site, is it best to leave the category URLs on the product pages?
I actually discussed this a little bit on e-com structure. If the category is part of the search, I leave it. If it is something generic like “products” I leave it and change it to something that is a target term.
Most out-of-the-box things use mysite.com/product/product-1 and the idea is that all your products are under the product category. Nobody searches for “product red bicycle” so that is a disadvantage but if this category is something that is actually part of the search, then it would be advantageous to leave it in.
A direct example would be “services” – sometimes the word service is something that somebody would search for. “plumbing services”, for example, would be a good one to leave.