SEO Silos vs. Topical Clusters (What's best?)
SEO Silos have been around for a while, but are they still the right way of building out your websites architecture? What about Topical Clusters? What if we used them together? Let's dive in.
Let’s start off with SEO Silo’s - Silo’s are a hierarchical organization of content where related pages are grouped together under a specific theme or topic.
but lets talk about why Silo’s have worked so well over the years?
1. This structure makes it easy for crawlers to find all your pages, and prevents orphan pages
2. We demonstrate topical authority by building a thematically connected silo - because all the pages are connected based on high relevance, we demonstrate our topical authority
3. when you start gaining backlinks, the authority from those backlinks flows basically throughout the whole silo, - important since your homepage (which will naturally get the most backlinks)
So how do we actually go about building one?
So before we get started with Silo’s we have to do some keyword research, so we know what pages we’re building first.
so lets take an example - of a travel website: [Visitspain.org](http://Visitspain.org)
So what would the internal linking look like to create this silo correctly?
So why does this type of silo work so well?
so topical relevance is high, and the authority flowing through the silo is well connected and also works well.
Now this works quite well in theory, but how realistic is this? For starters - we have to realize that not all of these pages will have the same value to us, and as a result shouldn’t have the same number of internal links pointing to it.
So this is most likely what a more realistic type of structure could look like - where we rank across the silo to try and push more authority to one specific page.
What about linking to other sides of the Silo? Well if we wanted to follow the strict SILO rules, in theory we can only link within our silo, OR to uncles as a maximum
again take the parent / child relationship, the arrows in green, we’d be allowed to have an internal link to, but arrows in red, we’d be breaking the integrity of the silo, and losing the topical relevance.
NOW do I agree with this rule and am i sticking 100% to these old SILO rules? When i’m building big silos, i really try my best to keep things within the silo, but sometimes there are internal links that make sense, and in that case i’ll break the so called integrity of the silo.
What about anchor texts?
Anchor texts allow google to understand the context of the relationship between two pages when we’re connecting them with an internal link, so as much as we’d like to add a bunch of exact anchors, try to mix it up, I try and follow 80% varied variations of the keyword you’re think and 20% random texts like - click here, learn more etc.
NOW, unless you’re building an ecommerce, or a massive content websites where you can clearly organic themes, topics and subtopics, this structure might not make sense for your site. Instead, lets talk abotu what you could do.
The first thing I recommedn is still following the pyramid structure,
These are quite similar to Silos, in that we still interlink collections of related content, BUT there are less rules. They’re still great for topical authority, and spreading link juice, and work quite well for smaller sites.
The beauty of topical clusters is that you can, there are no rules about internal linking between clusters.
say you have two clusters about fruits and vegetables, tomatoes even though they are fruits can sometimes be considered vegetables so theres definitely a contextual link in there somwhere.
Theres no real right or wrong answer when it comes to website architecture, there are a lot of different structures that are successful, The important thing is making sure that your website is easy to navigate for search engines and users. i actually think they can both coexist, depending on the sections of your website. I can imagine an ecommerce having a verystructured silo for their category, subcategory and product pages, but having clusters in their blog sections.
Let me know what you guys think, if you use any other types of silo’s or what your current set up is.
See you guys in the next one.
Timestamps:
0:00 SEO Silos vs. Topical Clusters
0:14 What is an SEO Silo?
0:47 Why do Silos work so well?
1:20 How do we build an SEO Silo?
3:52 A more realistic Silo Structure
5:38 What about Anchor Texts?
5:58 When a Topical Cluster works better
7:05 Can Clusters and Silo's work together?
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