Comment on Technical Support by SEO Dave.

WordPress Technical Support It sounds like you are trying to create multiple SEO silos (niched sets of content). There’s nothing wrong with what you describe, though if you are a Stallion responsive user you don’t need multiple installs.

There’s a general misunderstanding how silo SEO works, many think it’s related to folder structure (virtual or physical) so they build deeper and deeper sets of content within folders (with WordPress it’s virtual folders) like:

example.com/silo-1/
example.com/silo-1/page-1-within-silo-1/
example.com/silo-1/page-2-within-silo-1/
example.com/silo-1/page-3-within-silo-1/
example.com/silo-1/page-4-within-silo-1/

example.com/silo-2/
example.com/silo-2/page-1-within-silo-2/
example.com/silo-2/page-2-within-silo-2/
example.com/silo-2/page-3-within-silo-2/
example.com/silo-2/page-4-within-silo-2/

This sort of folder structure isn’t needed, it’s an SEO myth. This is fine:

example.com/silo-1/
example.com/page-1-within-silo-1/
example.com/page-2-within-silo-1/
example.com/page-3-within-silo-1/
example.com/page-4-within-silo-1/

example.com/silo-2/
example.com/page-1-within-silo-2/
example.com/page-2-within-silo-2/
example.com/page-3-within-silo-2/
example.com/page-4-within-silo-2/

Silos are built around content on a webpage and interlinking, although URL is an SEO factor it’s a small one so don’t try to get the main silo keyword in all the URLs of a silo set.

Avoid adding unrelated content to a set of pages within a silo, avoid linking to pages outside the silo. That’s all there is to silo SEO, with the above example you would link the pages in silo 1 together and link the pages in silo 2 together and avoid linking silo 1 to silo 2.

With most WordPress installs this is difficult because widgets are sitewide, so your links from one silo are automatically loaded on other silos. One solution to this is have multiple WordPress installs, the widgets are still sitewide, but sitewide now means specific WordPress install rather than domain wide.

This is a pain to manage and how I used to silo SEO content. Now I use features within the Stallion Responsive theme to create silos and reduce linking to unrelated content, this site (one WordPress install) is setup that way.

Go to this category https://stallion-theme.co.uk/responsive/wordpress-seo-tutorial/ and look at the Popular Articles widget, it only links to posts under the WordPress SEO Tutorial category.

Click on any of the posts under the WordPress SEO Tutorial category and again check the Popular Articles widget, you will find each post only links to other posts in the same categories.

I’m using categorizes as SEO silos.

This was achieved using the Stallion SEO Posts widget, it can create popular, recent and other types of widgets and includes silo SEO options. If you want really tight silos add content to only one category, want looser silos add posts to more than 1 category (I find 1 or 2 works best).

Look again at any category, scroll to the bottom and note a categories cloud: this is a standard Tagcloud widget with categories selected instead of tags (basically a form). Look at any post and scroll to the bottom and note the categories cloud is missing.

This was achieved using another Stallion Responsive feature related to widget displaying. I have the categories cloud set to only load on the home page and on archive parts of the site (doesn’t load on posts).

This means Google etc… can easily find it’s way through the site via the category links, but on posts there’s no unrelated category links. I don’t want my WordPress SEO Tutorial silo linking to the Make Money Online category or the AdSense Blogger Templates category etc…

So we have a tendency to only link to related content which is what silo SEO is all about. With Stallion the only sitewide content is the heading and the footer areas.

David