Silo Architecture and Mobile First
-
This goes to the age-old SEO argument - how many links in the navigation.
- We are a well-known brick and mortar brand
- We have 20,000 SKUs and over 500 categories and sub-catetgories.
- 95%+ of our backlinks go to the home page. We don't have a blog, but it's in the works.
- Our site is not responsive. It serves up different versions based on device type, but is not an "M Dot".
- Our rankings are pretty strong in spite of a large number of technical SEO issues (different discussion).
Currently, our e-commerce desktop site is "Siloed" (I'm new to the company - I didn't do it). The home page links via the top nav to categories. The category pages link to subcategories via sidebar navigation, or via images on the category pages (instead of product images). It's pretty close to textbook silos, and it's very near how I would have designed it.
This silo architecture passes the most link juice to our categories which target our highest search volume (head) terms. The categories pass link juice (albeit significantly less) to our subcats which target secondary terms. In terms of search volume and commercial value, our tiers line up very neatly. On average, the targeted subcat terms get about 1/6 of the volume of our head terms.
The Silo concept has been around forever, and is evangelized by Bruce Clay and other respected SEOs. Every time I've siloed an ecommerce site, the rankings improve dramatically, so who am I to argue?
So, what's the problem? Read on...
Our mobile navigation, on the other hand, links to every category and subcategory via flyout navigation (I didn't do this, either). In theory, this distributes an equal amount of link juice to all categories and subcategories. It robs link juice from our categories and passes it to subcategories.
Right now, this isn't a problem. Rankings are based on the desktop site, and minor adjustments are made for mobile rankings.
When Mobile First rolls out, our mobile nav will be the default navigation for Google, and in theory, link juice distribution across the site will change radically, and potentially harm our rankings for our head terms.
I always study site architecture for a number of respected ecommerce sites. Target and Walmart, for example, link to every category and subcategory through their mobile and desktop navigation. Wayfair takes a silo approach on mobile and desktop, linking in tiers.
I would argue that Walmart and Target have so much DA/TF/CF that they don't give a damn about targeted link juice distribution - it's all about UX. Wayfair's backlink profile is strong, but it's not Walmart or Target, so they need to be concerned about link juice distribution - hence the silo approach.
Have the Google spokespeople said anything about this? I see this as a potential landmine across the industry. Is this something I should be concerned about? Has anyone had any experience with de-siloing a website? Am I making a big deal out of a non-issue?
Please - no arguments about usability. UX is absolutely part of the equation. Usability is a ranking factor, but if our rankings and traffic take a nose dive, UX isn't going to matter.
This is a theoretical discussion discussion on link juice distribution, and I know that compromises need to be made between SEO and UX.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site architecture, inner link strategy and duplicate or thin content HELP :)
Ok, can I just say I love that Moz exists! I am still very new to this whole website stuff. I've had a site for about 2 years that I have re-designed several times. It has been published this entire time as I made changes but I am now ready to create amazing content for my niche. Trouble is my target audience is in a very focused niche and my site is really only about 1 topic - life insurance for military families. I'm a military spouse who happens to be an experience life insurance agent offering plans to active duty service members, their spouses as well as veterans and retirees. So really I have 3 niches within a niche. I'm REALLY struggling on how to set up my site architecture. My site is basically fresh so it's a good time to get it hammered down as best as possible with my limited knowledge. Might I also add this is a very competitive space. My competitors are big, established brands who offer life insurance along with unaffiliated, informational sites like military.com or the va benefits site. The people in my niche rarely actually search for life insurance because they think they are all set by the military. When they do search it's very short which is common as this niche lives in a world of acronyms. I'm going to have to get real creative to see if there are any long tail keywords I can use as supporting posts but I think my best route is to attempt to rank for the short one to three keyword phrases this niche looks for while searching. Given my expertise on the subject I am able to write long 1000-5000 content on the matter that will also point out some considerations my competitors dont really cover. My challenge is I cant see how this can be broken into sub topics without having thin supporting content. It's my understanding that I should create these in order to inner link and have a shot at ranking. In thinking about my topic I feel like the supporting posts can only be so long. Furthermore, my three niches within my small overall niche search for short but different keywords. Seems I am struggling to put it all into words. Let me stop here with a question - is it bad to have one category in a website? If not I feel like this would solve my dilemma in making a good site map and content plan. it is possible to split my main topic into 3 categories. I heard somewhere you shouldn't inner link posts from different categories. Problem is if I dont it's not ideal for the user experience as the topics really arent that different. Example a military member might be researching his/her own life insurance and be curious about his spouses coverage. In order to satisfy this user's experience and increase the time on my site I should link to where they can find more dept on their spouses coverage which would be in a different category. Is this still acceptable since it's really not a different subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insuretheheroes.com0 -
E-Commerce Mobile Pagination Dillema
Hi Everybody, I'm managing the SEO for an E-commerce site with different desktop and mobile sites (meaning, not responsive). We're changing the way reviews on mobile product pages will be displayed from 'view all' to pagination (due to server load). Basically the above the fold part of the page will always display the product, and below the fold will have x numbers of reviews on each page. But here is where it gets tricky: 1 - A different number of review pages will exist on mobile vs desktop (due to different no. of reviews per page on each device) - so I'm wondering what's the solution regarding canonicals. Usually every mobile page points to its desktop parallel, but now we'll have non-matching pages. 2 - The users will be able to change the no. of reviews displayed on each page. So the number of paginated pages will change accordingly. I was thinking about a solution where all the reviews will be in the first page's html (and only X of them will be displayed on screen), and all the other paginated pages will be created dynamically (with # and won't be indexed, so basically no pagination in mobile). Does anyone think this can be seen as cloaking or has any other thoughts? Thanks, Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)? The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites). The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well. Which of the following options would you opt for? keeping the description and just adding some unique content replacing the complete product description by a new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Mobile website on a different URL address?
My client has an old eCommerce website that is ranking high in Google. The website is not responsive for mobile devices. The client wants to create a responsive design mobile version of the website and put it on a different URL address. There would be a link on the current page pointing to the external mobile website. Is this approach ok or not? The reason why the client does not want to change the design of the current website is because he does not have the budget to do so and there are a lot of pages that would need to be moved to the new design. Any advice would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Site architecture: Deep drop menus & flat hidden menu?
I hope this makes sense. I am creating a site that will have normal drop down menu structure that will be about 3 levels deep: site.com/category/topic/sub-topic . I also want to add content that will be set up under a hidden menu, but with a sidebar module (placed on the relevant pages that are set up under the drop down) with links to other custom pages that will be relevant to the drop menu pages, but i'm hoping that the flat structure pages will show better for search: site.com/content-page The reason I am asking is because I have seen a competitor do this for a personal injury law firm and they show everywhere (throughout California) for vanity search -"city car accident lawyer". When you go to the site, they have a personal injury drop down that is 3 layers deep, but when you click down the layers, and look at the URL, they are all "flat" site.com/car-accident-lawyer, not site.com/personal-injury/accidents/car-accident-lawyer. Is having a hidden menu a problem? Is this strategy problematic in any way? Hope that makes sense. Thank you for any direction. BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
How do you prevent the mobile site becoming a duplicate of the full browser site?
We have a larger site with 100k+ pages, we need to create a mobile site which gets indexed in the mobile engines but I am afraid that google bot will consider these pages duplicates of the normal site pages. I know I can block it on the robots.txt but I still need it to be indexed for mobile search engines and I think google has a mobile crawler as well. Feel free to give me any other tips that I should follow while trying to optimize the mobile version. Any help would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0
