So I am designing our new ecommerce site and I'm making it a silo structure. Now I have been reading about siloing and keeping with the category theme in that silo. I know your not suppose to cross link to another silo/category as this will send mixed signals to google as to what the page is all about and then it wont rank as good. My question is this, lets use amazon as an example, on one of there product pages they have links to products in the same silo/category which is good, but they also have products that customers also bought and products from different silo/categorys. Now from those links thats not in the same silo/category its not very good the way I understand it as it dilutes the pages ranking by diluting the theme of the product page. The product pages I am working on will have the same type of layout having compatible, similar and products from other category's that customers might like. I was thinking on using nofollow tags on the links that go to product pages going to products that is compatible or products customers might like but doesn't have the same theme as the current product page and then let google follow the related products on that page that has the same theme. Now the thing is that I have read a few things that say it's not a good idea not to nofollow those links even though they don't have the same theme because you will lose link juice by adding a nofollow to those links. Now my question is, what should I do? I mean if I don't add the nofollow I will dilute the them of my silo/category and hinder that product pages ranking and if I do add them I will lose the link juice to those pages. How does amazon do it? do they let google follow those links that doesn't have the same theme and take the hit of diluting that pages theme and ranking? or do they add nofollow and lose the link juice? Sorry if its confusing :mrgreen:
Hey Loom, You got the right idea. Use nofollow and the link juice will still flow. It's a misconception that nofollow is like a sink stopper on link juice. How do I know? I have a site that ranks 1st page with 100% nofollow backlinks. Hope this helps.
Hey Diggity, You mean I should use nofollow on the products in a different category so not to dilute that product pages theme, but follow on the other products in the same category?
Yes, use nofollow between the non-relative product links. But Id also consider using nofollow in most cases, just from a ranking perspective. With silo-based SEO structuring, you basically want to use on-page links in a manner that provide link juice to the pages you want to rank. For example, lets say that you're selling blenders. Your homepage is blenderprops.com but your money keyword is "blender reviews", which is represented by blenderpros.com/reviews. You also have many subpages for reviews of individual products like blenderpros.com/reviews/blahblahblender.html. I would have all links pointing to blenderpros.com/reviews as follow, and all links pointing to the blenderpros.com/reviews/xxxblender.html pages as nofollow. These are probably low traffic, so no use in leaking the link juice from your money page. However, they're considered as supporting relevant pages in Google's eyes, so use them as a dofollow link back to the money page.