Part of: SEO Best Practice
Part of: Entity Based SEO Guide
Part of: Tenured Evergreen SEO
Published:
Updated:
by Wayne Smith
A skyscraper post is a webpage covering the breadth of a subject or topic on one page. Often it would have a table of contents for the page to jump to sections of the page. Listicle web pages are often long skyscrapers where people need to scroll many times to reach the bottom.
Topical skyscrapers often get traffic and impressions for low-competition keywords. Many of these keywords fall below the radar of tools used to identify keywords ... the majority of these tools rely on the data from Google PPC advertising, which they reprocess. Keywords not found in these tools often have very high click-through rates making them able to outperform more competitive keywords.
Entity Content Silos vs Evergreen SEO Silos
An SEO Silo would be a group of pages related to a keyword with a hierarchical link structure to a central parent page. Silos provide easy navigation to all the sub-pages.
As a navigation page, they provide a helpful resource for visitors, without presenting the visitor with a wall of words.
Avalanche SEO strategy
Converting skyscrapers is akin to the avalanche SEO strategy; but the keywords or terms are based on the actual terms the site can, or should I say does, appear for in the SERPs. The site over a period of time continues to update and provide a gain of knowledge on the topic -- as an authoritative resource for the topic -- resulting in an upward trend in Google related to the subject matter for the site.
Entity Silo upward trend: The upward trend of an entity silo can and does result in sites and pages with lower PageRank appearing higher than sites with higher PageRank. The silo structure builds pagerank testing becomes a differential equation, not a simple equation.
Generally speaking, Yandex search engine is based on Google's expired PageRank patent ... Avalanche SEO does not work with Yandex. Pages with lower PageRank don't appear above pages with higher PageRank in Yandex.
Bert natural language processing: Bert processing adds costs to Google, and the investment of resources for the content is not provided to all 400 plus billion pages in Google's index. The skyscraper page needs to see traffic from Google before it begins to show up for additional keywords. The time period to see meaningful keywords may be several weeks. The process is determining the entities used on the skyscraper and gaining knowledge of the relationship between its subject and the used entities.
Entity (relationship model)
The entity relationships model is part of natural language processing and is used to build Knowledge Graphs; understand the query intent; And, can be applied to semantic search.
Building pages from listicle headings
The process involves using the skyscraper to identify potential terms; In an ideal world, these terms would have been listicle headings. The content from the listicle skyscraper is cannibalized to form a new page; The relevance and SERP position of the skyscraper page should go down; The new content should be better than what was on the skyscraper page; And, the new page should receive better traffic and SERP position than the skyscraper page. The new page can also become relevant for new keywords.
Listicles: Content based on-page SEO
A listicle is a structure for a webpage that presents information in a concise and structured format for headlines. Often they have or can have a table of contents and are numbered; But, there is a lot of flexibility in the structure.
Using listicle skyscrapers is ideal because content from the skyscraper needs to be cannibalized for the new fresh pages. And, to not cannibalize keywords in search large changes to the page that was ranking for the term need to take place. Large changes result in the page being considered fresh.
Google's preference for new or updated content has even been mocked.
The Verge: Best printer 2024
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
The modifications of the skyscraper page are updates.
Keywords not in listicle headings
In an ideal world the keywords are in the headings of a listicle, but the "would of, should of," cliche applies. As the skyscaper is updated and content is reapportioned to new pages; The opportunities to create new headings for the skyscraper exist. The skyscraper is on a six-week update schedule until it becomes a finished silo.
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