How to Silo your Site

Silo structuring was a poplar way to structure your site a few years ago. It fell out of popularity as social media took control. It was easier to mass backlink and send social signals to a poorly structured site than to take the extra time to silo a site. Now that Google has made a push to discount low quality backlinks, the need for a well structured site has gained in importance.

There are 2 benefits to silo’ing a site.

1) It creates a well structured and highly organized site, which Google loves as it sees that as a sign of a quality website.

2) It allows you to pass down and direct the link juice from high quality backlinks.

What is a Silo Structure?

I would explain it as tall, skinny pyramids that are anot interconnected.

We will use NFL teams in our example below:

nflteams.com is our home page

From [nflteams.com], we have 2 links: [nflteams.com/afcteams] and [nflteams.com/nfcteams]

From [nflteams.com/afcteams], we have 4 links: [nflteams.com/afcteams/north], [nflteams.com/afcteams/west], [nflteams.com/afcteams/east] and [nflteams.com/afcteams/south] (and we do the same for [nflteams.com/nfcteams])

From [nflteams.com/afcteams/north], we have 4 team pages: [nflteams.com/afcteams/north/ravens], [nflteams.com/afcteams/north/browns], [nflteams.com/afcteams/north/Steelers] and [nflteams.com/afcteams/north/bengals] (and we do the same for the other 7)

*Note: For reference:

nflteams.com – homepage

nflteams.com/afcteams – 2nd gen pages

nflteams.com/afcteams/south – 3rd gen pages

nflteams.com/afcteams/north/Steelers – 4th gen pages

You can follow down the chain to get to any single team. The trick is, you cannot get from the Steeler’s page to the Eagles’s page without backtracking up to the upper pages first.

For example: To get to the Steelers page, I go to nflteams.com>nflteams.com/afcteams>nflteams.com/afcteams/north>nflteams.com/afcteams/north/Steelers

And to get from the Steelers page to the Eagles page, I go to nflteams.com/afcteams/north/Steelers>nflteams.com/afcteams/north>nflteams.com/afcteams>nflteams.com>nflteams.com/nfcteams>nflteams.com/nfcteams/east>nflteams.com/nfcteams/east/eagles

It is confusing at first, but once you understand the concept, it makes sense. That is the basic structure, not we will go over a few more rules to follow.

If you are using WordPress, change the permalinks to %postname% and always use pages, not posts

Place links to every page which is in the lower tier on that page. For example: the nflteams.com homepage should have 2 links on it: nflteams.com/afcteams and nflteams.com/nfcteams

You will have to get rid of any links that do not fall into this link structure. That means you will be very limited with add ons, sidebars, menus etc…

Interlink the lowest gen pages together. So all of the [nflteams.com/afcteams/north/____] pages, the Steelers, Bengals, Browns and Ravens, will link to eachother

That is the basic structure of a Slio site. When you send a strong backlink to your home page, it will strengthen your 2nd tier pages, which will strengthen your 3rd tier pages and so on. Silo structures work great so large sites and if you spend the time and effort to create strong manual backlinks. For small sites, easy keywords and automated backlinking, a silo site may not be worth the time and effort.