Site Architecture: Cross Linking vs. Siloing

[DonnieCooper]

I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's...

Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed?

As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great!

Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem.

Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases.

What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?

[AlanBleiweiss]

There's never one perfect solution, however here's the bigger issue.  Some people hear "flat" and they take it to the extreme. Which is a terrible concept in 2011.

If you go too flat, you muddy up the proper group relationships.  This is where Siloing comes in.

In my presentation at SMX Advanced this week, one of the many methods I recommend for "sustainable SEO" is to group your content, and reinforce that group relationship in URL structure, then with breadcrumbs, and finally with section-level navigation, where all the pages in that section have a link to all the other pages in that section, but where that specific sub-navigation is replaced or disappears as appropriate when you leave that section.

If you've got more than a handful of pages in a section, you should definitely go deeper.

The trick is knowing how wide, how deep to go.  It's an art as much as a process studying site data over time.

Another factor is the competitive landscape for a particular niche market.  The more competitive, the more important this concept becomes.

[blackballonline]

Great question. While everyone has their schools of thought; both methods have their benefits. I tend to favor flat architecture with targeted cross linking. I guess you could call it a hybrid strategy. I begin with a totally flat architecture and silo where it makes sense for the rankings and the navigation for the user. It's all about logical grouping and don't forget the pages must all be link-worthy on their own. If the pages are all strong enough to generate links the problem tends to take care of itself.

[EGOL]

The problem that a lot of people have is that their site grows in unexpected directions.  So the problem is not so much deciding upon the structure but more a problem of making the most of the expanding beast!

[dignan99]

I really enjoy topics like this, thanks for asking such a great question.

[DonnieCooper]

Thanks Alan. You mentioned, "where all the pages in that section have a link to all the other pages in that section".........

Can you think of any reason why you would not want detail pages within a category to link to one another?

[DonnieCooper]

Thank you Dave.

I guess it comes down to flowing PageRank within a category vs. restricting PageRank to the pages that have more links. Any idea why would someone prefer the latter?

[DonnieCooper]

I definitely agree EGOL. We like to meticulously plan out sites and SEO/PPC campaigns prior to launch, but over time a site's architecture definitely needs to be revisited. Usually at that time, we try to also implement any more advanced programming knowledge we might have accumulated to help ease the pain as well

Thanks EGOL!

[DonnieCooper]

Thank you dignan99. What's your opinion of silos? Do you like to cross link detail pages within a category to each other, or even category pages to each other?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Yes - if there are X number of pages within a section, it becomes too many to reasonably link from a sub-nav.  X being a subjective value that needs to be determined case by case.

Ideally, it might lead to yet one more sub-level (such as in sub-sub categories), or in pagination (not blocked from search.  That itself is challenging to do in the right manner so as to avoid going too deep or too thin.

There's no other reason I can think of though, and no other method I'd consider a best practice.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Oh - wait I just re-read your question as to not wanting detail pages to link to one another...

If I'm at a sub-category, I would not want, nor need, every individual product/event page in that group to link to each other.  Individual services details pages should cross-link to each other within that service section at that level though, for usability.

Does that make sense? Or did I just confuse you?

[DonnieCooper]

Not at all, thanks Alan. I think we're in agreeance.

As long as one is not exceeding Google's approx. outbound links per page... and as long as the the navigation make sense to the users.... specific detail pages within the same category should be linked to each other. Is that what you're saying as well?

Here's one example of why I think this is best for indexation reasons. I've attached an image of the page where I circled some stuff

What do you think Alan?

nHQf2.jpg

[dignan99]

I spent some time using a silo plugin for a wordpress site early on, and also spent some time with a theme that had a silo format, but ended up switching over to a flat site architecture, I just did like the theme for wordpress that used silo, and the plugin seemed like junk.

I'd love to take a look at a well run silo site if you know of one.

[dignan99]

What are the perceived negative effects, if any, of doing a silo structure?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I agree with Rand's '09 article in general, however there are some things I think take it a bit too far (such as redirecting PDF documents for link juice).  If a PDF is truly the most relevant content on a topic, I believe it should be indexed.

The biggest factor is that if we get completely bogged down in this process just for SEO sake, we lose focus on user experience.

It's right up there with page and link sculpting - to me, it's a waste of time and harms user experience.  And the time spent going that far is, in my opinion, in 2011 much better spent on other SEO tactics.  Not just because Google has changed how they deal with nofollow links.

[AlanBleiweiss]

If anything, sometimes silo structure is not the best for user experience, or the drill down too deep, into ever more thinner content to the point where it's so thin as to have a negative impact on SEO and user experience.

[DonnieCooper]

Yeah, I agree Alan. I don't usually think it's a good return on invested time to practice PageRank sculpting either. One could for example, being building links or generating content with the time/ resources instead

I just re-read what you said, "Individual services details pages should cross-link to each other within that service section at that level though, for usability." To be sure I understand what you're saying.... if your architecture is for example
vehicles -> cars -> luxury -> bmw
vehicles -> cars -> luxury -> mercedes
vehicles -> cars -> luxury -> jaguar
then bmw, mercedes and jaguar would link to each other... correct?

[DonnieCooper]

Take for example, a resort detail page on oyster.com. They have a section called "nearby hotels to consider", which I believe serves two purposes...
#1) it's likely helpful to users, as most people don't restrict themselves to staying at just one specific resort, and
#2) it helps search engines flow PageRank, crawl and index other pages in the 'Aruba' category.

What I can't figure out is, what benefit would it have to not include these links to nearby hotels? (Except perhaps, on checkout process pages of course.)

What if the 'Raddison' Resort for example, got a ton of inbound links and the 'Westin Resort' had only a few? Well, you could cross link them and help the Westin Resort page rank... and simultaneously show your users more relevant options.

[dignan99]

Ultimately,  the silo process just takes a bit of time for each new post making sure it links to another category?

I know there are plugins for wordpress that will do automatic linking based on any word you input, and it will link a set or random number of times throughout your site.

It could be worth setting up for me and just include some keyword phrases in the correct articles just to get the link process going properly.

[blackballonline]

Great find on that post. It lays it all out. As long as the silos are thin (not more than 2 layers beneath the home page) it can bring a benefit to adding extra ranking pages with minimal work comparatively. Rand talks about eliminating the bottom layer of the hierarchy to push the content up a level and make the resulting pages extremely stout. The major problem is always going to be the end of the chain. He calls them PageRank sinks.