Comment on SEO Silo Theme by SEO Dave.

SEO Silo Structure If it’s the domain you use as your email address which is a site targeting Shemale and LadyBoy SERPs I took a look.

I cut my SEO teeth on adult websites (almost 15 years ago), my first online business was selling sex toys and lingerie and to generate backlinks owned free porn websites: still have some that make some cash from affiliate stuff (Cecash and places like that).

Looking at the archive.org version of your site from June 2014 you’ve made some major changes to the home page recently. You’ve gone from a standard sort of WordPress blog home page (latest posts) with standard linking to posts and categories (no silo SEO link structure).

Looks like you seem to name your posts OK SEO wise (didn’t look in great detail), though the Genesis framework and Genesis child themes tend to use poorly optimized anchor text for internal links (like “Continue Reading…” as anchor text which is anti-SEO).

To today a very clean home page with over optimized anchor text (the anchor text per se is OK, but it’s an issue because there’s so few internal links) and very little thought for making sure your entire website has a linking structure that spreads link benefit easily, you’ve over optimized your silo link structure, you’ve only thought about the silo link structure and not about spreading link benefit.

By changing WordPress Posts to WordPress Pages you’ve removed the automated internal linking (categories) which makes passing link benefit/PR through a site easy.

I assume you were trying to remove unrelated links/anchor text (links to categories) to silo SEO how your content is linked together.

It’s really bad SEO advice you’ve followed converting WordPress posts to pages, the output of a post vs a page is pretty much the same, but you loose the automated internal linking (no categorization) and a lot of WordPress features tend to be created for posts not pages.

Quick count on the home page looks like you have 10 of 14 links use anchor text format:

“Shemale persons name” or “Shemale something”

Only four links don’t include anchor text Shemale.

Note the categories links are hidden from Google as they are in a dropdown menu, so Google can’t access your categories via the dropdown form.

That’s not a lot of internal links for a home page with over 800 pages indexed in Google and none of the links going to categories. Looks like you used to have over 30 links from your home page.

If that’s how you always had the site (which you didn’t) and it ranked, not a problem, but if you’ve gone from dozens of internal links with varied anchor text spreading your home page link benefit throughout the site to what you have now, you’ve just decapitated most of your sites internal links SEO benefit.

I bet if you look at Google Webmaster Tools most accessed landing pages you’ve removed links from them with your new silo link structure (risk you take changing a link structure).

Most webmasters don’t realise most internal webpages rank well because of internal links, I assume your individual posts don’t all generate hundreds of backlinks, so most PageRank/link benefit comes via internal linking from home page PR (many sites get most links to the home page).

Google last updated public PR in December 2013, so don’t know if your PR1 homepage is accurate (my PR0 home page isn’t accurate, probably be PR4 or PR5 when PR finally updates).

If you link from the home page to an internal page you are saying that internal page is important. If it take a few clicks from home you are saying this content isn’t important.

Perfect SEO world every webpage gets a home page link or even better a sitewide internal link (think spread link benefit).
Perfect SEO world you reduce the number of links from each webpage so more benefit flows to related webpages (think silo SEO).

See the contradiction, you can’t have both: you must compromise.

By converting Posts to Pages you’ve deleted your categorization, this means Google will find it harder to spider your site and SEO benefit won’t flow smoothly through the site unless you build a well thought out link structure manually (looks like you got it wrong).

Silo link structures are great for harnessing the power of targeted anchor text, by removing links to less related content you increase relevance, BUT you must also make it possible for SEO link benefit to flow through the entire site otherwise parts of the site won’t have much link benefit.

I don’t use many WordPress Pages, 99% of my site is WordPress Posts. I try to spread my posts over the most relevant category (one category per post and never use tags). Based on the number of posts you say you changed to pages sounds like you have the same amount of basic content as my site does (about 250 articles).

See the bottom of my home page there’s a categories cloud with 19 categories. Go to any category and you’ll see the same category cloud, go to any post and the categories cloud isn’t loaded (Stallion display widget feature). This is a compromise between siloing anchor text on posts (I don’t want the 19 category links anchor text on posts) and sharing PR/link benefit through the site via links (the categories cloud spreads the link benefit through the entire site, but only via categories).

My categories range from 2 to 38 posts per category. For what I’m aiming for 2 isn’t enough and 38 is too many posts in a category (the 38 are Stallion Responsive tutorials: difficult to split up). Ideally want under 20 posts per category.

For siloing links anchor text I use Stallion features, the easy version of silo widget option (simple selection dropdown menu) isn’t part of Stallion Responsive 8.1, will be in the 8.2 update (working on it), there’s a comment at Silo SEO Widget with a zip file with the Silo SEO modification that will be in Stallion 8.2).

If your site was mine I’d convert the WordPress pages back to WordPress posts and use Stallion Responsive to build a similar setup to this site, it’s a compromise between link benefit flow and silo SEO of related anchor text.

There’s not an easy way to check if a link structure will be effective, I can say if you split your content over say 10 categories, add a categories widget or cloud on all categories, but not on posts. Add Stallion SEO Posts widget with the silo SEO option set as described at SEO Silo it will generate a better optimized site with link benefit spread through the site.

David