Hi All, I want to some basic SEO terms which are using by SEO bloogers in various websites like: 1) SEO Soiling? 2) SEO Sculpting? Can some one explain with an example, Thanks in Advance
the term is Siloing, and refers to selectively change your link properties to scult your pr towards several pages... do not attempt this as it will result in a penalty for a site with not very much content
Can you simplify it further for me please ...What would be an example of changing link properties? Thank you
Umm Wrong... These are both VERY effective techniques... SILOING: Siloing refers to compartmentalizing your site into several silos or verticles where everything in a silo is about the same topic. Another term for it is using Theme Pyramids (see Brett Tabkes explanation on WebmasterWorld.com if you subscribe). The home page and pages just below the home page will typically target head terms. The deeper you drill down into your site the more specific the topics become and the more long tail the keywords you target become. For example, if I have a mortgage related web site my home page (www.example.com/) would target head terms (competitive terms) like "loan", "loans", "mortgage","mortgages". The home page typically acquires the most inbound links so it has the highest potential of ranking for these very competitive head terms. Perhaps I would divide my mortgage site into 3 silos or verticles or pyramids - one for each type of mortgage loan category. I might have a silo for Mortgage Loans, one for Refinance Loans, and another for Home Equity Loans. So my 2nd level pages might be product pages and have URLs like: www.example.com/mortgage-loans/ www.example.com/refinance-loans/ www.example.com/home-equity-loans/ The mortgage product page (www.example.com/mortgage-loans/) might target keywords like "mortgage loan", "mortgage loans", "home loan", "home loans", "mortgage home loan", "mortgage home loans". These are still competitive terms, but less competitive than those targeted by the home page. Under each of the above 2nd level pages I might have a rates page, a calculators section, and an articles section. So now my site has 3rd level URLs like: www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/calculators/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/articles/ www.example.com/refinance-loans/rates/ www.example.com/refinance-loans/calculators/ www.example.com/refinance-loans/articles/ www.example.com/home-equity-loans/rates/ www.example.com/home-equity-loans/calculators/ www.example.com/home-equity-loans/articles/ The mortgage rates page (www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/) for example might target keywords like "mortgage rate", "mortgage rates", "mortgage loan rate", "mortgage loan rates", "home loan rate", "home loans rates", "mortgage home loan rate", "mortgage home loan rates". Notice the deeper you go into a silo the more specific the topic and the more long tail the targeted keywords become. Maybe under the rates pages you will have a national rates page with national averages and a local rates page for each state. Under the calculators pages you would have calculators for those specific types of products. Under the articles pages perhaps you would have articles about that product. If you have lots of articles then you'd probably have article sub-section pages instead which would have the articles under them. So you end up with URLs like: www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/national/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/alabama/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/alaska/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/arizona/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/arkansas/ etc... www.example.com/mortgage-loans/calculators/payment-calculator/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/calculators/points-calculator/ etc. www.example.com/mortgage-loans/articles/first-time-home-buyer/ www.example.com/mortgage-loans/articles/types-of-mortgages/ The key again is that the deeper you go the more specific the topics get and the more long tail the keywords that the pages target... Even more important is how the pages link to one another... While every page on the site is likely to have the same global navigation (Mortgage Loans, Refinance Loans, Home Equity Loans, Contact Us, and About Us for example), the pages within a verticle should primary link to pages immediately above or immediately below. There should be VERY little linking across silos/verticles or even from one subvertical to another. This not only creates a clear hierarchy in your site structure or information architecture that make it easy for spiders to crawl your site and determine which pages are most important to include in the index, but it also ensures that pages on your site are linked to by the MOST relevent pages on your site. A page's single parent page and all of its children pages ARE the most relevent because they are about the same topic (just less or more specific than the current page, depending on whether linking up or down into the verticle). Breadcrumbs help enforce this by linking only to the pages above... So if I'm on the mortgage rates page (www.example.com/mortgage-loans/rates/) the breadcrumb might be: Home -> Mortgage Loans -> Mortgage Loan Rates linking to the parent and grandparent page... The content on Mortgage Rates page should mainly link to the Mortgage Loans page (immediate parent) and its children - national and local mortgage rates pages. Hopefully that gives you a better picture of what it is all about an why it's an excellent strategy to improve the relevancy of interlinking of pages on your site. And we all know, Google likes your links to be from relevant pages with relevant link text. SEO SCULPTING (more commonly known as PR/Page Rank sculpting): This is mainly used to "sculpt" the flow of PR/Page Rank around the site. If you don't know how page rank is calculated I would suggest reading Sergey Brin and Larry Page's The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine (http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf). Pay special attention to Section 2 where there explain how they pictured this new "Page Rank" to work. It is their blueprint of what was to become Google written when they were at Stanford. You should also read their patent on calculating page rank (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...50&s1=6285999.PN.&OS=PN/6285999&RS=PN/6285999). While the formula may have been refined slightly over the years, it is still based largely on these original concepts. First you should know there are 2 types of Page Rank... The one most refer to is the one you see in Google Toolbar (TBPR) - the little gray or green bar with values typically of 0/10 to 10/10. This is not the 'real' Page Rank for the page. It's a snap shot of that page's PR a couple weeks before Google did their last TBPR update. They typically update this 3-4 times per year. It is already a couple weeks old an out of date by the time they publish a TBPR update. The 'real' Page Rank of a page is constantly being updated everytime they index a page (old or new) that links to or used to link to the page in question. This is actually the value used for one of the 200+ ranking factors in their algorithm. It is a measure of the quality and quantity of inbound links to a page. When Google issues a TBPR update, they basically map the current 'real' PR value to a 1-10 TBPR based on some logrithmic scale. If the logrithmic scale were, say base 10, then the mapping might be as follows: Real PR---------------ToolBar PR 1-10---------------------0 11-100------------------1 101-1000----------------2 1001-10000--------------3 10001-100000-----------4 etc. up to TBPR=10 As you can see it gets exponentially harder to get to the next TBPR. Regardless, say a page has a real PR of 500 (TBPR=3) and it has 20 outbound links. Then each outbound link will be passed approximately 25 real PR points (500/25)... Actually it's a little less than that because their is a damping factor that causes a bit of decay. So if the damping factor is 15% then each will be passed 0.85*(500/20) or about 21.25 real PR. PR Sculpting refers to using REL="NOFOLLOW" attribute on the <a> anchor element of some of your outbound links to prevent PR from being passed out through that link. Basically, by reducing the number of followed outbound links, you increase the amount of real PR passed out on the remaining FOLLOWED links. In the example above if you add rel="nofollow" to 5 of the 20 outbound links, that means Google is going to pass about 33.33 PR points to each of the remaining 15 followed links (500/15). Again if the damping factor is 15% then each will be passed 0.85*(500/2) or about 28.33 PR. The types of links that are typically nofollowed as part of PR Sculpting are non-content type pages you really don't care about ranking in the SERPs... like about us, contact us, privacy policy, terms of service, disclosures, etc. Hope that helps.
What a great explanation. I started typing then scrolled up to see his description. Mine was quite poor, i deleted it haha
Wow... was late and I made a couple of typos... should have read Regardless, say a page has a real PR of 500 (TBPR=3) and it has 20 outbound links. Then each outbound link will be passed approximately 25 real PR points (500/20)... Actually it's a little less than that because their is a damping factor that causes a bit of decay. So if the damping factor is 15% then each will be passed 0.85*(500/20) or about 21.25 real PR. My bad! and... should have read In the example above if you add rel="nofollow" to 5 of the 20 outbound links, that means Google is going to pass about 33.33 PR points to each of the remaining 15 followed links (500/15). Again if the damping factor is 15% then each will be passed 0.85*(500/15) or about 28.33 PR.