Replicating Silo Structure with Permalinks?

maximus

maximus

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Hoping someone can help me understand something better. I see the value of having a non-flat architecture for a website ..ie silos.

Want to try to restructure an old site and wondering if bringing silo structure could be done using a manually augmented url/permalink structure?

example old url --- http://chickenandwaffles.com/my-favorite-recipe-fried-chicken-greens/
say i just changed the url/permalink to say --- http://chickenandwaffles.com/recipes/fried-chicken-greens/

then redirected/replaced old links to new url

Will google/bing bots think i have a category called "recipes" with "fried-chicken-greens" as a page inside that category?

Not sure if anyone has had any experience with what im talking about but any input would be appreciated.
 
You would need to add the new pages to the index and then delete the old pages from the index.
 
You don't have to have a category page to create a silo.

I would create a new page (not post) and link to each post in the silo from it within the body of the text. And then link the posts together and back up to the page.

Having an actual category page won't make for better seo. As far as search engines are concerned it's just another url.
 
In 08, we moved a page of 250k pages to a new URL structure.
As we changed systems completely, there was no way to forward to the new structure for individual pages, the only redirects where made for section start pages.
Google picked up the new URLs w/out a problem.

YMMV

::emp::
 
You have to change the permalinks to help google understand your silo. You can do it with breadcrumbs, for instance. I know this works because I had a flat site but the breadcrumbs and categories sorted it out.
 
emp said:
In 08, we moved a page of 250k pages to a new URL structure.
As we changed systems completely, there was no way to forward to the new structure for individual pages, the only redirects where made for section start pages.
Google picked up the new URLs w/out a problem.

YMMV

::emp::
Click to expand...

As golan mentioned I will have to purge the index of the old urls. Curious. How were you able to smooth talk google index into updating quickly to show new URL structure.?. Especially for a quarter milly urls..
Will frequency/ weight of xml sitemap crawl help? Maybe pump a lot of new content to get the bots horny? Don't want duplicate content issues with both urls/pages indexed.
 
One thing you have to know is a silo is more than just the permalink structure.

@Calamari is right, you don't have to have category pages. What you do have to pay attention to though are levels.

If you link from the root domain (homepage) to /recipes/fried-chicken-greens/ it's still going to be Level 1 because links play a part here too.

I'm sure you can see how that's potentially confusing for a visiting crawler? Also can you see how it could be considered as manipulative one day if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed? It's just not worth it.

I would stem the keyword/title to something like /fried-chicken-greens-recipe/ instead.

Not to say I do it like this at all anymore...

While you don't have to have a typical category page, it certainly helps to have an actual parent page. Again URL Structure is one of the least important parts here...

The reason a parent page is important in this instance is because it first of all gives you another ranking opportunity and the design should reflect this. A silo is important for UX as well. Other than your homepage these Level 1 parent pages ought to be the most important pages on your site and act as landing pages in their own right. In many cases these are more important than my homepage...

By not doing this you're missing out on potentially ranking for the broader keywords in your niche which is just ridiculous if you ask me. I'm not saying you'll rank on the first page for a broad keyword with lots of competition, but if it's in place early on, with time it will continue to improve.

Then we get into the relevancy factors, things like co-citation, a parent page that links to it's relevant child page will give you the added benefit of ticking these factors.

These Level 1 pages also make fantastic URLs for building links to.

I do this on every project now and these are not in any sense category pages, they're vital landing pages optimized for keywords in their own right.

What @emp said by the way has little to do with setting up a crawl frequency priority or anything like this... A site with 250k pages is probably being crawled all day long and you can't expect Google's crawlers to treat a huge site the same as a site with 10-20 pages or even 100-200 pages.

Pumping in new content really isn't going to help you massively there, but in any case I would add some because I'm of the mind that you should always be adding more content. On many platforms like WordPress for example a new post or page gets pinged when it's published, that's how they get alerted about new content so quickly and to be honest you could just ping each page individually, starting with the old URLs...

You will want to .301 the old pages, but don't worry needlessly about old pages still being indexed... As soon as they pick up on the new page they should pick up on the .301 as well so that's a non-issue really. There's also this beautiful thing called a canonical .301 which you could use as well.
 
Last edited:
maximus said:
As golan mentioned I will have to purge the index of the old urls. Curious. How were you able to smooth talk google index into updating quickly to show new URL structure.?. Especially for a quarter milly urls..
Will frequency/ weight of xml sitemap crawl help? Maybe pump a lot of new content to get the bots horny? Don't want duplicate content issues with both urls/pages indexed.
Click to expand...

@maximus
Well, what you have to understand is that google has an interest in keeping up to date. It does not help their quality if they just lose your stuff.
A well-planned move will have google following your footstep.

I mentioned this earlier, the site is http://www.isn.ethz.ch

So.. as an authority site in the niche, Google crawled us very frequently. Most sections were crawled daily, some news-oriented parts of the site (that we moved away from, don't ask me why) as much as every 15 minutes.

When the site was rebuilt, the only urls that we COULD forward where the main page and section pages.
There simply was no easy pattern to do it any other way. (Even some sections were renamed, moved, the URL changed for everything).
Basically, very bad for any site.

So what we did was in effect this:

myurl.com/oldsection01/* --> 301 --> myurl.com/newsection01
myurl.com/oldsection02/* --> 301 --> myurl.com/newsection02
myurl.com/ANYTHINGELSE --> 301 --> myurl.com

Google was redirected and happily indexed the new stuff and dropped the old urls on its own.

Now, this happened so easily and rapidly because this was a huge authority site.

But in effect, the same will happen with any site, although it might take longer.
If you do have a pattern in your new URLs that enables you to forward everything... even better, as both google and - more importantly - your visitors won't notice the difference.

::emp::
 
Thanks emp. The site in question is not nearly as deep or established at what you describe. My idea of site architecture was terribly flat and verbose 3 years ago. Looking at some of those urls makes me cringe. I really want to fix onsite now in conjunction with building with cleaner beefy links, Have already started a small batch of url restructure and will report what I see.
 
I don't think you can re-route juice into a physical silo just by replicating it with your URLs, but I think you can route google's understanding of the topical flow using URLs and breadcrumbs, as mentioned above.
 
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