Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015

[juun]

Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply?

and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Both is the way to go. Silos are essentially structuring your pages so that per topic, there is 1 master article and multiple supporting articles that link back to the master article. The topic only links to pages relevant to the topic and not other sections of the site.

You can use breadcrumbs in conjunction with a silo as the structure is suitable for them.

[AMHC]

Silos will always work. It's not some trick - it's how Google works. Here's a very simplified explanation as to why...

Let's say that I have an eCommerce site, and I sell lawnmowers and Plywood. Let's also say that the Lawnmowers category page has a theoretical 100 points of link juice. Lets also say that the site sells 2 lawnmowers - the Fubar 2000 and the Toecutter 300. If the lawnmower category page only links to the Fubar 2000 and the Toecutter 300 pages, the category page will push 45 points of link juice to each page (pages can pass on +/-90% of their link juice, and 90/2=45).

Both pages will receive almost the full 45 point benefit because the pages are relevant to the category page.

If the Lawnmower category page instead only has 1 link to the Plywood page, the Lawnmower category page would push 90 points of link juice to the plywood page. But, the Plywood page would not receive the full benefit of the 90 points, because Lawnmowers and Plywood don't share much relevance. In this case, Google would heavily discount the 90 points, so that the Plywood page might only get the benefit of 30 points. Think of it as a leaky hose.

What happens to the other 60 Points of Link Juice? It gets dumped on the floor, and the site loses the ranking power of those 60 points.

Keep in mind that this is all theoretical, and that link juice comes in different flavors like apple, orange and prune, representing the different ranking factors (Trust, Authority, Topical Authority, Social Signals, etc.) . Orange might discount 90% while prune might only discount 10%. In this case, is there really a 67% link juice hit? Damned if I know, but I had to pick a number... This is all theoretical. I do know that link juice loss between pages that aren't relevant is dramatic. I also know that it is very possible to determine how your internal pages rank based on your internal link structure, and link placement on the page.

By siloing a website, I have seen rankings jump dramatically. Most websites hemorrhage link juice. Think of it as Link Juice Reclamation. The tighter you can build your silos, the less link juice gets dumped on the floor. By reclaiming the spilled link juice and putting it in the right places, you can dramatically increase your rankings. BTW, inbound links work in a similar fashion. If the Lawnmower page was an external site and linked to the Plywood page, the same discounts would apply. That's why it pays to get niche relevant backlinks for maximum benefit.

This in no way accounts for usability, and linking between silos can make sense to benefit end-users. Again, this model is probably overly simplified, and doesn't take into account Block Level Analysis, but the logic is sound. You can build spreadsheet models for link juice distribution factoring in Block level, discounts, etc. It's by no means accurate, but can give you a pretty good idea of where your link juice is going. You can model this on the old (and increasingly irrelevant) PageRank Algorithm. Pagerank is Logarithmic and it takes 8-9x as much link juice to move up in PR. If it takes 100 points of Link Juice to become a PR1, it takes 800-900 points to become a PR 2. Generally speaking a PR2 page, via links, can create roughly 7 to 75 PR1 pages, depending on how close the PR2 is to becoming a PR3.

[juun]

great thanks very informative reply, i've started using wordpress for most of my sites now, is siloing easy enough to do in wordpress?

[AMHC]

It's been a while since I've used WP, but if you use posts (or posts and pages), you will have a major silo and duplicate content problem with blog category pages.

The way to solve this is to go to the section where you set up your post categories, and set the slug to be identical to your category page. For example, if you have a page category with the slug "blue-widgets", set the post category slug to "blue widgets". This makes the category page the parent for posts in that category.

There are also some adjustments that you will need to make to your URLs removing "/category/ from your URLs. I've done it, and it's pretty easy. Maybe another poster could give you the specifics.

[juun]

great thanks ill give that a go