Are Silos Still Important for SEO?
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I am in the process of migrating www.nyc-officespace-leader.com from Drupal to Wordpress and my developer is of the opinion that it is not necessary to implement silos to achieve favorable ranking for competitive keywords.
I know a lot has changed in the last two years with Panda and Penguin. Is it SEO best practices to implement silos in the course of the redesign? Will this make a significant difference for SEO?
Thanks,
Alan Rosinsky
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Silos do several things that make them valuable IMO:
First they allow you to control how pagerank(ranking potential) flows throughout your site.
They allow users to navigate your site much easily(imagine trying to navigate amazon if it wasn't in silos)
It makes internal linking easier because then you don't have to stretch to find a legit way to link all the pages within a silo
You can focus on specific keywords or keyword categories
Those are a few of the benefits. So yes I think they are still really valuable.
P.S. the majority of updates have been punishing people who are trying to game the system through content farms, anchor, texts, and other linkbuilding tactics. Good information architecture is still good information architecture.
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In my personal experience I always find silos a positive strategy as long as its not natural and not overblown. I think it makes a user's experience more concentrated and in turn will help your on site time and make it easier for you to build links for a specific term.
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