Authored by: Lisa Barone

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/barone/009352.html

A Snippet:

In its simplest terms, siloing is a site architecture technique used to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for both its common and more-targeted keywords.

Good information, but advice such as this:

Sticking with our peanut butter example, say your site sells a type of jelly that is particularly complimentary to creamy peanut butter. It may be fitting to link from your peanut butter page to the flavored jelly page. Since the jelly page would be a supporting page in the Jelly silo, you would want to link your creamy peanut butter page to the landing page of the Jelly silo instead of to the particular flavored jelly page. Doing this would dilute your theme of the creamy silo. By linking to the top of the Jelly silo, you not only keep the integrity of the two silos, but you also are helping to establish the Jelly landing page as the main page for that silo.

makes me nervous. This strategy is focused solely on the engines and appears to disregard the needs of the visitor. I'm also concerned it sacrifices conversions. It does make sense to cross sell jelly with peanut butter. Not linking directly to the individual jelly product page is making the visitor go around his elbow to get to his butt :) Not the easiest way to convert lookers to buyers.

I did see where a suggestion was given about using a nofollow tag. However, that was stated for use when "you absolutely had to link the creamy peanut butter page to the flavored jelly page." Of course you would want to. That's how you make more sales :thumbsup2

Just be cautious about how far you go to appease the engines. Creating a site focused more on the needs of the SE's instead of the needs of your visitors is a dangerous game.

There are tons of ways you can drive traffic to your site. There are only so many ways to get people to buy once they are there. ;)

Hi,
Thank you for a very useful article.

I have questions.

Does a landing page mean top page like index.html?
If so, does a silo of expample have 6 pages(1 landing page + 5 sub pages)?


I understand all subpages links to their main page when I use virtual siloing.
I wonder if they are linked from their main page too?
(i.e. the main page links to all the subpages)

I see that this article is from a few years back and hope that my question can get answered. It seems like siloing is an important concept and SEO tactic.

Well here is what the problem is and I would appreciate any help or suggestions ...
I have read what Jennifer Laycock and Bruce Clay have wrote about web siloing, but like Suzukik's comment above - I am unclear on the linking structure involved in siloing.

Let's say my site is about real estate and two themes are Toronto real estate and Mississauga real estate. I could have some sub categories / html pages like the Current Toronto Market Conditions for the Toronto Theme and Current Mississauga Market Conditions for the Mississauga real estate theme.

My concern is with orphaned pages and the linking structure... I understand that for optimal page rank, sub categories should link to the theme but what about on theme pages? Do I offer a link to the sub categories / html pages and use Nofollow tags? Or what about if I link to the theme page twice from each sub category / html page and just link to the category / html page from the theme page just once and not use Nofollow tags? I don't want to start sculpting page rank with No-Follow tags - unless it is necessay.

Also...

I have a blog where there is a page for each new blog article that I release, but they are not linked to from anywhere on the blog site. The blog articles each link to the index.html page of the blog from a link i.e. <a href="index.html">read all articles</a> - I am not sure if this is a good navigation structure for the blog site.

The ideal world runs into reality! In theory the structures suggested in the article sound easy, but when you have your content it is not always so easy to do. Just link as much as you can in a natural way.

Link as much as you can from blog posts to content on your site. If necessary resort to; For more information see .... You might also be interested in .. I learned the heard way that the site and blog can appear separate to the search engines. For a site I set up, after a while the site (mysite.com) was PR 0 and its blog (mysite.com/blog) was PR 2. Not want I wanted!

Why use nofollow tags on content pages? Unless of course it is a link to a page you don't want indexed for some reason such as a password page.

More important than some complex linking pattern for the search engines, can your visitors easily find everything? If they can, so can the search engines.

As you mentioned siloing was first mentioned by Bruce over 5 years back, and the web has certainly evolved since then! I think what it was trying to do was to think about Categories before blogging platforms like Wordpress arrived.

CMS Platforms like WP now automate this process so long as you categorize your posts. You can even try a related post plugin/script to allow this to occur even deeper.

For me I never use no follow links, but they do good in some situations. Otherwise I wouldn't get too wrapped up in the PR game.

My primary site for example (rankbydesign) ranks #8 for "seo" keyword but only has a PR of 3 I think, last time I bothered even looking at that.

My advice would be to spending more time creating new content, than wasting it trying to understand a complicated algorithm which will only change with time.