Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Garry, I asked the same question about wordpress plugins  Check it out, everyone had some great responses!

Lately, I've been using admin page treeview and advanced custom fields. I highly, highly recommend both.

For SEO, I usually steer away from plugins and prefer to code with php based on the page uri or title. Sometimes for meta descriptions, we use custom fields. Most of the time, if the site is 50 - 1,000 pages, we just hard code everything using php functions and variables... Perhaps I should post a Youmoz about that. Sound interesting?

Hey Ryan, I think you answered your own question. A wiki type page with links to forums could be pretty useful I feel. Good idea! Compare that to your standard forum category page such as Google's Webmaster Forum. I would not 'noindex' the page either, because you're likely to get a lot of useful links to that page, and could rank for some good queries with it.

Would it be possible to expand on your wiki idea, and possible have social type content on the page as well? perhaps for example, you could pull in a couple tweets about each, or something of that nature. Mostly, I'm thinking, how could the page be made more shareable.

What do you think?

Hey Adrien,

tuango.ca redirects to an inner page. And, that inner page has some links  
For groupon.ca, I found 66K+ links.

Does this help?

This SEOmoz webinar should be exactly what you're looking for

Anyone have anything else they'd like to toss into the discussion?

Any examples you'd like to share of detail page linking vs. silos?

[edit] Just found this (old) blog post by Google about the importance of (internal) link architecture... I quote:

Q: Let's say my website is about my favorite hobbies: biking and camping. Should I keep my internal linking architecture "themed" and not cross-link between the two?

A: We haven't found a case where a webmaster would benefit by intentionally "theming" their link architecture for search engines. And, keep-in-mind, if a visitor to one part of your site can't easily reach other parts of your site, that may be a problem for search engines as well.

I would remove it from your sitemap... and be sure to 301 redirect one of them to the other.

(I'd redirect /index.php to http://www.mydomain.ca)

Does this help Martin?

Hey Costume, Google's Conversion University is a GREAT resource of Analytics videos. No doubt some Analytics webinars from SEOmoz would be great too

Hey Petra, that's not a bad idea either! I've notice Google has updated their Places Help Articles, so we should all probably revisit how we treat 'local'.

Hey Ryan, thanks for the ideas. Respectfully, I disagree however.

With something as simple as 'rand(1,4)' in php you can generate random #s. There's no telling what Google could do with their algorithm(s). Okay, so it's (relatively) easy to do, but why would they do it? After-all, they have heavily invested in complicated models that do the ranking for them...

Well, they've heavily invested in complicated algorithms, and if cracked, bump- there goes there flagship product.  I'm sure SEOmoz aren't the only people attempting to glean insight using machine learning. And perhaps, others don't like to publish their findings and tip anyone off.

Of course, I'm not an A.I. scientist, so perhaps I misunderstand how unsupervised machine learning works, but I'm under the impression that it very well can be used to logically explain all of those factors. I'm sure there's tons and tons of work that would go into it, but if you had the resources (and some do), wouldn't you do it?

This is why I wanted to post this question though- to get feedback and other opinions, so thanks Ryan!

Hey Casey, I've got an idea I think would help everyone.

Minor programming: using API's to build great content and link/social bait. 
I've been searching the web for help getting started with APIs, but I can't find anything very useful for beginners trying to understand the basics. We could use SEOmoz API for examples to help people get started.

This ajax'ed comparison tool is kindof helpful, but in my opinion there's not much (great) content on the web about this topic

Darn, I can't delete this comment

I believe, sometimes you may 'deserve' the first position, but get #3. And of course, sometimes you may deserve #3 and instead be #1. All due to a 'randomness factor' in search engine algorithms.

I've been holding this hypothesis for quite sometime. Really, it started when I learned about SEOmoz using machine learning to better investigate SEO best practices.

I suddenly found myself wanting to learn more about machine learning, and the implications of using it for SEO. I'm by no means able to utilize machine learning myself, but I it appears unsupervised learning would have a real chance of cracking search engine algorithms. Hey, even Stuxnet was cracked!

Surely Google/ Bing would know (and account for) this, right?  We can agree they'd obviously prefer a highly skilled mathematician not be able to crack the code.

Therefore, I'm led to believe that search engines use some sort of randomness in their rankings. Maybe not much. Perhaps not all the time. But if a random percentage of search results, had a random variable of sorts included in their calculations... wouldn't that be enough to prevent the vast majority of cracking attempts?

Thoughts, opinions, criticism? Thanks.

Yeah, your right. I would image those links aren't relevant when on store pages, and would definitely distract some people

On their product pages though, they use some cross linking to relevant topics. But I'm sure it's at the bottom- out of site- as to not distract people. So I would image those are mostly there for SEO. Would you agree?

I think you're right Alan, that makes great sense. Thanks. Do you think Etsy's sidebar is a good compromise between the two? I'm sure testing each site is the best way to figure out what users prefer on that specific site. But in general, do you think that's a good balance to use in order to keep too many links off the page, yet still keep detail pages within a category linking to each other?

Sorry for the confusion Alan, and thank you very much for the discussion.

To help clarify for others reading this discussion (and for myself), are we both agreeing that: in the attached image it is an 'SEO AND usability best practice' for the hotel detail pages inside the Tallahassee category/directory to link to each other?

*Of course, there are always caveats,  such the maximum outbound link limit recommended by Google, etc.

But as a general practice, would you have "Hotel 1", "Hotel 2" and "Hotel 3" (inside the "Tallahassee" category) link to one another?

D1i8j.jpg

Indeed Alan, that's good advice we all should follow. Thanks. I'll follow suit from here-on

Also agreed. However, when new SEOs enter the sphere, they must start somewhere. And, clearly there's value in studying other's work to help clarify, expand or even challenge one's own hypothesis and practices. I also avoid implementing a tactic/ strategy on a paid client project, if reputable SEO's and/or the community as a whole, recommend against it. I may try it on my personal site, but not a customer's. Thanks for all your help Alan.

Respectfully, what's the difference between the nearby hotels example and the cars example?
More specifically, If these 'nearby hotels' links might dilute that articles topical focus, why wouldn't a link to 'mercedes' from a 'BMW' page?
Thanks Alan.

I actually don't, because I've always thought it was a bad idea. But it seems other folks don't think it's so bad under the right circumstances.

I'd be interested in seeing a good example of an effective silo as well....
anyone?

Thanks Dave. This is exactly why I posed this discussion.... it seems as if a lot of us are getting something different from these architecture type posts.

I think it has to do with making same-level detail pages link to each other. Especially if you link to them using the anchor text they're trying to rank for.

For example, what I get out of an article like Richard Baxter's post on SEO Architecture, is that detail pages should link to each other, and that Silos should not be used. And the more architecture posts I read on SEOmoz, SEOgadget and Distilled... the more I think it's a 'best practice'.

That said, it seems from these comments that some folks read those articles differently. I think this is a serious discrepancy that we SEOs should address