I've been reading about the theoretical importance of using silo structures for SEO purposes. Can anyone say, from experience, how significant the silo structure is? Is it always a good idea to use silos or should it be avoided in e-commerce sites, for example?
I've just set up some experiments with a silo structure. My navigation on my older sites is flat, so it will be interesting to see if their are any ranking differences on the new stuff. I'll post the results in a few months time.
I just spent about 9 months converting a PR7 ~4000 page site to a Theme Pyramid based site and converted the site to using a Content Management System at the same time. Every URL on the site was having to change from .asp/.aspx extensions to extensionless URLs because of the CMS, so I figured since I had to redirect practically every old URL to a new extensionless URL anyway, I might as well restructure the site into Theme Pyramids (or silos or verticals... whatever you want to call them). I would suggest if you haven't already, that you read Brett Tabke's Post on Theme Pyramids about 1/3rd of the way down the page. I can tell you that my Google rankings have gone through the roof! I did fix a lot of other things such as canonical issues, eliminating query string parameters from all URLs, optimized every <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, etc. all at the same time so I won't claim that pyramiding or siloing was responsible for all of the ranking improvements, but it has definitely had a big impact. But I saw HUGE improvements in rankings and traffic within a month after implementing the changes which were done all at once. One of the most noticable things that I have seen from pyramiding is that my indented listings in the organic results have gone through the roof. Almost any time one of my pages appears at position X, I get an indent at position X+1. The indented listing URL is almost always the page directly above or below the main listing URL in my site's structure. It makes total since because they are about the same topic only targeting slightly more general or specific versions of the keyword phrase. Another thing I noticed was that my home page was PR7. The pages directly under the home page (top page for each vertical) became PR6. Next level down PR5. Next level down PR3s and PR4s. So the PR flow around the site was nice as well. People always talk about how to sculpt PR or manage the flow of PR around a site by optimizing the way your pages interlink. I think Pyramiding does a LOT to manage the "flow of relevance" around your site which is extremely important at Google and something I don't recall anyone every really discussing in forums here or at Google or at Webmaster World. If you take any page on my site and look at it's topic and targeted keyword phrase(s), its parent page is about the same topic only a more general version of that topic targeting broader keyword phrases for that topic. If you look at that same page on my site, all of its children are about the same topic only more specific versions of that topic targeting longer tail keyword phrases for the topic. Using Pyramiding really is mostly about maximizing the interlinking of relevant pages to one another and minimizing the interlinking of irrelevant pages to one another. Any page in your site "tree" should try to mostly link to its parent and its children which are both guaranteed to be relevent pages... You minimize the cross-linking over to other verticals. For example, if I had a loans based site I might break it up into home loan, auto loan, and credit card pyramids or silos as follows: example.com/home-loans/ example.com/auto-loans/ example.com/credit-cards/ The home loans section I might further break down into mortgage, refinance, and home equity loan sub-pyramids like: example.com/home-loans/mortgage/ example.com/home-loans/refinance/ example.com/home-loans/home-equity/ example.com/auto-loans/ example.com/credit-cards/ For each loan type product pages I might have a calculators, rates, and news section like: example.com/home-loans/mortgage/calculators/ example.com/home-loans/mortgage/rates/ example.com/home-loans/mortgage/news/ example.com/home-loans/refinance/calculators/ example.com/home-loans/refinance/rates/ example.com/home-loans/refinance/news/ example.com/home-loans/home-equity/calculators/ example.com/home-loans/home-equity/rates/ example.com/home-loans/home-equity/news/ example.com/auto-loans/calculators/ example.com/auto-loans/rates/ example.com/auto-loans/news/ example.com/credit-cards/calculators/ example.com/credit-cards/rates/ example.com/credit-cards/news/ Under each product's calculators section I would have pages for different types of calculators. For example under the mortgage calculators section I might have: example.com/home-loans/mortgage/calculators/loan-payment-calculator/ example.com/home-loans/mortgage/calculators/loan-comparison-calculator/ example.com/home-loans/mortgage/calculators/home-loan-affordability-calculator/ etc. As you can see, I've got a very silod tree structure for my site that starts off broad and gets more and more specific as I drill down into the site. My home page's <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content, etc. would target my broadest, most generic, most competitve and hardest to rank for head terms or keyword phrases like "Loan", "Loans", and "Loans Online". My home loan product page's (example.com/home-loans/) <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content, etc. would target slighly more specific home loan related keyword phrases like "home loans" and "home loan". My mortgage product page's (example.com/home-loans/mortgage/) <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content, etc. would target slighly more specific home loan mortgage related keyword phrases like "mortgage", "mortgages", "mortgage loan", "mortgage loans", "mortgage home loan", and "mortgage home loans". I would not target all 6 of these in the <title>... probably 3 like "<title>Mortgage - Mortgage Loans - Mortgage Home Loan</title>". But those 3 keyword phrases would take care of 5 of the 6 phrases above... and "Mortgages" I would possibly work into a couple <h2>s on the page and include it in the content. Now I have a 50% keyword density for "mortgage" within the <title>... the primary keyword I want it to rank for which also appears first in the <title>. I also have "Loans" with a 16.66% density as does "Home" and "Loan". This kind of <title> will cover most of the big volume targeted keyword phrases that are combinations of the keywords "mortgage", "loans", "home", and "loan"... yet "mortgage" is definitely most important appearing first and having the highest density within the <title> Anyway... you can see where this is going. You keep doing this as you drill down into the site. Breadcrumbing is one good way to reinforce this siloing... since a breadcrumb will link to the parent page, the grandparent page, the great grandparentpage, all the way to the home page. Then within the content of the main body of any given page I will embed contextual links to the parent page and the children pages and possibly grandchildren pages. So other than the top global navigation that will probably link to the top product page for all of the major pyramids or verticals (like Home | Home Loans | Auto Loans | Credit Cards | About Us | Contact Us), my pages would always be linking to to more general or more specific pages about the same topic and therefore be passing relevancy very efficiently up and down each pyramid or silo. I'm a big fan of pyramiding...
Great to hear that other people are getting great results with the silo structure! A lot of marketers dismiss it, but there are huge benefits IMO
it that is user and search engine friendly why not good for it... but if its not rather go for something that is user and SE friendly.