Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO 1,200+ posts in only 8 categories averages at 150 posts per category IF you have them spread evenly (which you won’t).

With the standard 10 posts per category that’s 15 pages deep, unless you have a high PR site (loads of backlinks) there’s a very good chance a significant amount of your deeper content rarely sees a search engine spider (can’t find them, some content will be over 10 clicks from home!).

I try to keep the number of posts shown in a category to under 20 and try to keep the number of page 2, 3 category to as low as possible and of course don’t forget about siloing your categories (keep the posts within a category to a strict theme). With your site for example I’d rather have 30 categories with on average 40 posts a category with the number of posts shown per page set to 20 which would result in most categories going 2 or 3 pages deep than your current setup of 15 pages deep.

This would have a sitewide impact, posts that are currently getting very little link benefit will get significantly more and those that get most link benefit could see significantly less. So there’s going to be ups and downs in current SERPs, I would recommend compiling a list of the pages that gain most traffic and add them to a custom menu and add them as a sitewide widget so they don’t loose their current internal backlinks. Basically if you have a post that with your current setup has a sitewide link and you change it so it only has one link from page 2/3 of a category it might loose rankings.

I bought this site a Mobile Phone Reviews site last year and reorganised it.

157 posts
10 categories
15 posts shown in a category and I tried to silo the theme of the category.

Categories range from 8 to 15 posts per category (most are around 10-12) meaning there are no page 2 categories.

Since I own over 100 domains I don’t have the time to spend reorganising sites to the level I’d suggest for a webmaster with one site. If I had the time I’d push posts that gain no search engine traffic because they aren’t really targeting SERPs into categories with more than the ideal number of posts so they get even less link benefit. I’m sure you have lots of posts that don’t really target anything, in a perfect SEO world they either need targeting at some SERPs (a rewrite which takes time) or partially removed from the site so they don’t waste too much link benefit and don’t water down the siloing of the categories they are linked from.

For example if you went with around 20 categories, 20 posts per archive page and designate 4 categories to push less important posts into (100 posts per category for example) the number of posts in your ‘important’ siloed categories that are targeting SERPs is dramatically reduced: 400 posts in the unimportant categories means 800 in the important categories, 800 posts into 16 categories = 50 posts per category, if set to 20 posts shown per category it averages 3 pages deep which is similar to having 30 categories and evenly spreading all posts. In the real world you won’t get perfect numbers, keep them in mind and will help spread link benefit more efficiently.

What is Siloing? Not familiar with link siloing, basically you theme an entire site or section of a site (I do the latter) so it only links to related content. WordPress categories are ideal for siloing, try to avoid adding unrelated content to any of your important categories. You can also see from this why I avoid the over use of tags, many WordPress users will add their posts to 5+ tags and by doing this there is no siloing within the tags.

David