When to Silo and When NOT to Silo
Siloing has become a bit of a buzz word, and people think they need to silo their 10 page micro niche sites. :) You don't. Not even close. You rarely need to even silo a site with 50-75 pages.
In the shaving niche for example, you could silo braun, panasonic and philips shavers, then you could further silo down into braun series 3000, series 5000, series 7000 and series 9000. I don't believe this gives you an advantage. In fact, I think it limits you. Since the Hummingbird update Google has been very good at determining relations between topics. They know that 'best electric shaver' is the same thing as 'top electric shaver' and very similar to 'electric shaver reviews'.
You want internal links between pages that are only slightly similar. You want links between your beard trimmer page and your braun reviews page. It helps to build a big picture about your site through the internal anchors and content. You don't want to limit yourself to only linking between braun shavers, and philips shavers.
Now, things change when you have very different niches on your site. If you expand your shaving site to include all mens products and have a new section about anti aging cream for men, then you don't really want to be interlinking between shavers and creams.
There is SOME topical relevance between them though, and with siloing you do link from 1 category page to another.
Let me draw you a couple of site architecture plans to elucidate my thoughts on siloing.
Mens Shaving Site - NO siloing
I have not shown any interlinking here, because you want to be linking off anywhere from anywhere. We're only concerned with site structure, not siloing. So link from your shaving oil vs creams article to a philips at941 review, or to a panasonic shavers page, or to a how to trim your beard. Use varying anchor text like "Speaking of oils, if you have a beard then find out <a href="blah"> why beard oil is amazing</a>.
What's important here is just the logical structure of the site.
I would have the best electric shavers, beard beard trimmers etc as links in my main bar with dropdowns for the others. If I had 3 levels, I would only use a dropdown menu for 2 levels btw.
On my Best Electric Shavers page, I would have a custom wordpress menu over to the right with a heading like "Shaving Articles"
Then in my Best Beard Trimmer page I would have the same but title the menu "Beard Maintenance Tips", or something like that.
For the brand ones, it would be "Braun Reviews"
What if we wanted to actually silo this example?
Now, if this were actual siloing, I would only link blue to blue, or blue to purple, or blue to homepage, green to green, green to purple, green to homepage and so on.
In strict siloing, children can only link to parents, grandparents, uncles, great uncles, and of course brothers. Never to cousins.
Ie, if we "shaving oils vs creams" was a category page, with another 5 sub-topic articles under it, those articles could link to each other, to the parent "shaving oils", to the grandparent "best electric shavers", and to the great grandparent "mens shaving site", and to uncles "choosing shaving cream", great uncles, "best beard trimmers", but "how to trim your beard" would be a cousin once removed :)
Look at this
You are "self". So self can link to ANY parent, ie, grand parent, great grandparent and it can link to ANY uncle, great uncle and so on. It can't link to a cousin.
So let's say the self on that links to "great great grand parent". They are a DIRECT descendent, ie, strongly related. The great great uncle, is the brother of the great great grandparent, so they're also very related to them, thus are ok for you to link to, BUT, their child isn't close enough in the "bloodline" for you to link too. Ie, not relevant enough.
But, we don't!
We don't want to silo here, instead we do want to go link crazy. Link everywhere and anywhere wherever it naturally works in the article. Internal linking is POWERFUL. It moves juice about your site, and it builds relevance.
Mens Luxury Products Site - We silo here
Here's an example of the type of site where you would want to silo.
The way I would structure this is on the main menu of the homepage we have "Shaving", "Anti-Aging" and "Dental" with dropdowns 1 level below, ie, to best beard trimmers, braun shavers and so on.
If you click on 'shaving' you'll have the same menu you would have had on the shaving only site. Same idea. Drop down to 1 level.
If you click on Anti-aging, you'll get a menu with 'best anti aging creams', 'anti aging foods' etc.
Now, inside each dark orange section, I don't recommend following siloing rules. Structure the site the way I discussed above, BUT, link around everywhere inside the dark orange. So any anti-aging page, links to any other anti-aging page, BUT, "best anti aging creams" only links to "Shaving" or "Dental", it doesn't link to "best beard trimmers", and definitely not to "how to trim your beard".
By doing this you build up tight, focused topical relevance for "shaving", "anti-aging" and "dental". You do not need to build up tight relevance for "beard trimmers", separately from "electric shavers" though. That's just too extreme and I think actually harmful.
Also, if a case arises inside your braun review, where you feel it's natural to link to an anti aging product. Just do it. Don't stress over siloing. You don't want all your anti aging articles linking off all over the shop to dental and shaving, but the occasional article linking to a dental or shaving article, where it's appropriate, is natural and fine.
Source :
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