SEO Siloing
September 4th, 2006 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Sometimes you’ll come across something new and it’s so different to the way you currently think, it takes a while to get your head wrapped around it to the point of where you understand it. This is exactly what happened with SEO Siloing.
The first person who actually tried to explain this to me was David Ogletree. I was a bit thick in the head and didn’t quite get it at that point. When I redid my blog a few months ago and went retro simple I employed this tactic. The homepage in essence acts like a huge sitemap. It has links to all of the areas of the site sliced up by category, month, site information pages, offsite links to other areas I’m experimenting on and offsite links to other sites (go ahead look over to the right and scroll down). Compare it to this single post page about roboform tips. Now scroll down and look at the right hand side. After the advertising notice the only thing there are the category links. Ok technically there’s an Alexa button but we’ve already discussed why that’s there (Alexa get ‘yer game on), and there’s also a technorati button but we’ve had problems on that end too (see back in technorati). So basically each page links only to the other major sections of the site and not to the 97,000 different ways blogs usually link on their side navigation.
There are two other factors I feel that are coming into play here. First I’ve got a decent amount of inbound link juice that I qualify for deep crawling. The second is my custom query string wordpress plugin. What I’ve done is override the normal limitation wordpress has for the number of posts it displays per category, I’ve gone through and set mine to 99,999 which in effect makes each page it’s own little sub-category site map.
Now I’m not the originator of this idea and to be honest I’m not sure who is. However I was recently listening to a podcast where Bruce Clay mentioned it and gave it a name (Bruce Clay and Monte Kahn Podcast mp3 format). You can also read about the concept known as Siloing on the main Bruce Clay website. For those of you with terribly short attention spans I’ll try to summarize it for you.
Let’s say you have a website about baking. You have a section on baking cookies, a section on baking bread, and a section on cooking supplies. Inside of the cooking section you have 10 basic articles about baking cookies and 50 cookie recipes. In the bread section you have a dozen articles about baking bread and 25 different bread recipes. You also have 25 different baking items you sell. For each section you have a mini sitemap that links to all of the pages underneath it. So the mini sitemap for cookies will link to all 10 of the basic cookie articles and all 50 of the cookie articles. It will link to the bread mini sitemap and cooking supplies mini sitemap but not to any of the individual pages in those sections. The bread mini sitemap will link to the 12 bread articles and the 25 bread recipes. It will also link to the cookies mini sitemap and cooking supplies mini sitemap, but again not the individual pages in those section. If you were to go to an individual cookie recipe it would only link back to the cookie mini sitemap, bread mini sitemap, and cooking supplies mini sitemap, and not to any of the other individual pages in that section. Now don’t get all anal about the concept, if you have a recipie for chocolate chip cookies that uses milk chocolate it probably makes sense to link to a white chocolate chip cookie recipie, however it doesn’t make sense to link to a macaroon recipe.
Removing all of the superfluous navigation makes the page a lot easier for people to read. It also makes it easier for you to focus their attention where you want it as well (affiliate links, adsense or anything else). For this to work you are going to have to have some prominent primary navigation allowing people to find the mini sitemap pages pretty easily. Additionally you should probably have a decent site search feature.
Is this the solution for every site, nope. For it to work properly you’ll have to have some well defined distinct topics. You’ll also have to be willing to go against the blog Nazi’s (thanks Dave Taylor) who have preconceived notions that a blog has to have certain elements to be considered a blog. Lastly and probably most importantly as I said above you are going to have to have the juice and trust to qualify for a deep crawl.
For those of you who want to see what happens when you go the other way, check out On Site Intra-Linking Wordpress SEO Experiment SEO Black Hat.
Sphere It
September 4th, 2006 at 10:02 am
What’s the difference between siloing and DMOZ.org navigation: categorical, hierarchical, directory style navigation?
September 4th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Getting to a page like this it’s not too different
http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Entertainment/Performing_Arts/Circus/Clowning/
however in the middle it gets way too interconnected
http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Entertainment/
September 4th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Clarification, IMHO it’s too interconnected because it’s too deep. [clowning] should be a child node of [entertainment]. Use a visual grouping and hierarchy on the [entertainment] page to keep things organized for the humans.
Did that make sense?
September 4th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
How ’bout the difference between siloing and theme pyramids?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum34/68.htm
IA is a BIG part of SEO these days along with the trust crap it seems. It’s like the revenge of onpage SEO.
September 4th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
It makes for nice a nice comparison between your technique and seoblackhat’s as well. Will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
September 4th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
I have been thinking about completely removing my sitemap from SEO BUZZ BOX and just letting my categories exist as mini sitemaps. SEO Siloing? Gheesh, didn’t know there was a name for it, don’t go and get all SMO on us there graywolf fellah.
I have been siloing on one of my blogs for 2 years, does this give me a founder credit?
September 4th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
It’s not really about removing the sitemap (which I definitely wouldn’t do BTW), it’s about creating small partitioned areas of your website, and removing the intermediate navigation from those pages. I don’t think it’s the right solution for everyone, especially if you are aren’t getting at least some free google love now.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Graywolf, Isn’t this just Information Architecture 101, ok maybe 202? Theme pyrimids and all?
Information Architecture
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/7649.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/7774.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/8863.htm
Theming
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3060.htm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum34/68.htm
September 4th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Yes and no, one of the things that really is different is removing of navigation to other mid level pages from the child node pages, ie removing the side panel navigation entirely. Although WMW is an excellent example of the practice being used.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:10 am
hmm lot’s of comments and email questions, look for a follow up post later this week
September 5th, 2006 at 5:15 am
With you there Micheal (and Todd didn’t see your post there when I posted :).
I *theme* whatever I can, so once I have a solid IA in place the links never really go across a theme (unless very relevant, & even then only linked from the content specific to it) but only deeper down through into the ‘child pages’.
That way my internal links back up the chain to home are also themed and pass rank back appropriately with nice descriptive anchors and maybe a nice anchor theming the home from each page (that works real nice if the anchor can be unique to each page and the homepage as well).
WMW is an excellent example alright!
September 6th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Hi Michael,
I have been teaching siloing in a down to earth way for several months now at my site.
There is certainly a ton of buzz going on in the IM/SEO world right now in regard to Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), theming and siloing.
I does carry good ranking power as proven by sites libe cabelas.com, allaboutlawns.com, animated-teeth.com (just to name a few).
Some big players in the market like Andy Jekins and Brad Fallon are pushing this knowledge into the marketplace in a big way. Keywordcompanion.com offers a good video on their website as well.
LSI and themeing are not new but with the new Google dance it is playing a heavier and heavier role in determining the “relevance” of web sites.
Jason Potash will be interviewing me and Russell Wright this afternoon on the subject. I just published a 195 page ebook on the subject as well.
Definitely a hot topic, very scientific and interesting.
Great post BTW.
Charles Heflin
SEO 20/20
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:44 pm
I am wondering what you might recommend for a site that has a massive amount of information.
Example:
Site dedicated to legal topics with database to all attorneys of all types in all states.
This would be a lot of data, generated dynamically. Per your siloing article, would the page for ‘Texas attorneys’ have a link to all attorneys in texas? Or all the cities, and drill down from there?
And would you recommend mixing up the anchor text with a little server side code as to make it appear more natural, rather than “Attorneys in City, State” every single time?
Thank you in advance.
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I’d group off of the texas stuff in one silo (ie texas corporate law, texas tax law, texas dwi laws).
I don’t have a problem with
Attorneys in new York
Attorneys in New Jersey
Attorneys in Virginia
as long as the text on each page is really different not the same with just the state name changed (ie mad libs text)
October 2nd, 2006 at 1:30 pm
This is interesting - something I tried explaining on SEW a long time ago - something I called Landing Pages (probably not disimilar to the concept for PPC).
Basically, it’s a place to group all of your keyword links to key category areas relating to that keyword area.
That way, you can better target not simply your link building keywords, but also convert visitors better because they have almost certainly landed on that page looking for the subject the keyword is focused on - and you make it easier for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Really, it’s nothing new, to be honest - I think my own “Landing Page” approach and David’s Siloing are essentially derivative of the search engine pyramid Brett Tabke posted up years ago, which unfortunately I’ve not been able to find a copy of.
The essential basics of the SE pyramid was to treat your index page as a site map, and essentially separate keyword areas and then drill down so that each page attempted to rank for a specific set of keywords.
May have a copy saved to harddrive somewhere if you’d like a copy - nothing like a graphic for helping to explain things better.
May 1st, 2007 at 11:44 am
Its great to see that beside Google, also Yahoo and MSN is addopting LSI. There is software available on the Net called http://www.quintura.com that helps LSI related words to discover and to use inside your silo.
Regards,
John Bertrand
October 24th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Isn’t this basically what About.com has been doing for years? Might partially explain their tendency to dominate search engine rankings.