Part of: Entity Based SEO Guide
Part of: Tenured Evergreen SEO Factors
Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
An SEO Silo would be a group of pages related to a keyword with a hierarchical link structure to a central parent page. They provide easy navigation to all the sub-pages. Content silos can be stacked linking to additional silos.
Typically based on keyword targeting of long tail search phrases. The targeted approach can improve the visibility for the long tail search queries.
Content silos can take a wide number of structural forms and be based on products, not keywords. There is no consensus on what is or is not a silo beyond a group of pages linked around one main page, which receives a boost from what are considered relevant links.
Link pyramids, topical cluster hubs, et al.
Some have adopted alternative names for different types of structures, but many relate to how the pages are interlinked. If all pages should be interlinked or only a limited number are interlinked. All variations can still be called content silos.
Helpful or Unhelpful Content
The Excite Search Engine was the first to consider these content clusters as helpful content for search. Google's page rank also considers silos as helpful, as all the sub-pages link back to the main topic page, and all links are relevant.
Not all SEO content silos would be considered helpful for search engines. When links are not relevant they are discounted or not counted -- how the silo is constructed (or how they are interlinked) needs to vary based on the type of content.
The SEO innovation of content silos:
The inspiration for content silos dates to when Excite gained market share. Excite considered content silos as helpful -- matching their vision of indexing less pages but better pages, where a user could navigate to a page and find ten additional pages about the subject.
The Excite search engine generated enough traffic to provide an ROI for content created specifically to rank on the Excite search engine. While SEO may have had its start with Inktomi ... Excite SEO took it to its next logical level.
Silos in Google work because of how page rank works. Content silos in Google may be based on external links to the silo, but that link profile is not a requirement. Ranking based on the content being linked to from the home page works as well.
Unlike Excite, after 2005 Google's page rank algorithm requires links to be relevant. Link bombs no longer work. Relevancy requires the anchor text for the link to match at least part of the content on the page being linked to. Although now link relevancy looks at factors beyond the anchor text -- the anchor needs to have relevancy for the page it is on.
Mouse vs Mice; when Google's algorithm matched plural and singular noun forms the matching anchor text could be either form and still be considered a relevant link -- synonyms work in the same way.
Entities are based on relationship between entities
A helpful structure would be one based on the "type of" entity relationship, and site structure "has part" or "is part of" being in agreement with the entity relationship structure.
Testable and Empirical Evidence
The general process to test for SEO factors is to create a test in a way that does not have other variables. When dealing with entities there are other variables.
For keyword testing, a new keyword (such as a hashtag) or nonsense phrase is used to remove other factors. However, for first link bias the only factor being tested is the order of the links and the keyword in the anchor text ... it is therefore isolated from other variables. But for entities nonsense phrases can not be used as a test bed. Instead observational data, did the page go up or down in SERPS, needs to be used, which is subjective regarding what factor created the change ... For content silos there are a number of factors in play even before considering entities.
Entities are not free from other factors and can not be created on the fly; And, the large language models used by search engines are evolving.
We can see and understand that entity-based SEO is sensitive to the additional entities that are being referenced. For example, a new page about LED lighting referencing the power savings, color, amount of light, and style can be replaced in the SERPs an older page on LED lighting that references LED lights is made from semiconductors and other technical details.
On-page entity SEO needs to focus on the related entities that are popular with the given search intent.
... Don't Overthink Entity Silos ...
Smart people have the superpower to make the simple complicated. The customer support person helping a customer with LED lighting knows what related entities are the most helpful. Google picks up the knowledge based on the long tail keywords people use in search results.
In layman terms, an entity silo is a helpful information silo. It is a silo where visitors click on the links to additional information about the entity.
The innovation of search engines is to surface or promote pages matching a simple intent ... even if the process seems complex ... the content remains simple in construction -- Answer the visitor's questions, so they don't need to go to another site to get the answer.
... Solution Smith tests SEO tactics so you don't have to ...
Full-stack SEO has a lot of moving parts, and it takes time and effort to understand the nuances involved. Solution Smith takes care of the overhead costs associated with digital marketing resulting in real savings in terms of time and effort.
A search algorithms is based off of mathmatics and ranking factors must be quantifiable or countable ... factors that are only true or false can be used for quality indicators to determine if a site will be listed or buried.
