We have been searching for a good SEO company that can improve our SERPs in the search engines, and one of them has really pitched a new approach called Silo. Their presentation makes a lot of sense, but I cannot find many companies doing this. Can anyone / everyone give me your thoughts, knowledge and experiences with the Silo approach for optimizing a website. Thanks, in advance for your help.
It's probably just a name they've given to something that everyone does. Perhaps if you explain actually what they're doing people can be a bit more help.
Many companies do it. It is the use of a luinking structure such that you pass the correct link juice to only the targetted pages. SILO uses nofollow to restrict passing of PR juice to your internal pages so that only the targetted pages gets the PR. EG: When you have a blog, the home page links to every category and the category then further links to related pages. You may only Pass link juice from home page to targeted keyword pages and use nofollow to restrict PR flow to other unrelated pages. You may only link to those irrelevant pages from other pages that are related to it.. By Siloing you organise the flow of Link Juice... It also includes creating a page for "dog training" and creating a sub page called "how to make dog eat".. and the dog training page need not give a dofollow link to a dog naming page.. And there are other techniques.. Hope you getting the idea..
So it's just having a logical site hierarchy? That's nothing new, any half decent SEO is going to understand the value behind having the correct site structure and internal linking.
You can say that, but what SILOing does is the use of nofollow to stop passing link juice to unimportant pages. Otherwise the basic premise is the same. They also call it sculpting.. EDIT: You may want to read this and follow the links in the post http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/01/siloing.html
Cheers - I have come across it before, but as with most things in SEO people like to give it a name to make it sound more impressive!
You are right, and even though we don't use nofollow very religiously for SEO purpose, the all-in-one-seo plugin has features to nofollow archives and categories. I usually nofollow my categories and archives and give a list of popyular pages or posts by category in the sidebar
Looks like I attracted some pretty heavy hitters here who really know what they are doing. Most of your comments are very helpful to me. Thanks . . .
@merlionsg do you want to do it manually (it's a tedious and time consuming task) or get a plugin to do it for you.