Both is the way to go. Silos are essentially structuring your pages so that per topic, there is 1 master article and multiple supporting articles that link back to the master article. The topic only links to pages relevant to the topic and not other sections of the site.

You can use breadcrumbs in conjunction with a silo as the structure is suitable for them.

With that code, Google won't index any pages within that particular category.

Unfortunately, without a specific folder pattern, you cannot block via robots.txt

Wordpress Admin > Posts > Categories > Edit the category you want to noindex > Set "always noindex" for "Noindex this category" box

EDIT: looks like that just noindexes the actual category page.

Here is a workaround I found...

1. Find the category ID (WP Admin > Posts > Categories > Edit the category you want to noindex > look at URL for the tag_ID # (this is the category ID))

2. Edit your theme header and include:

<?php if (is_single() && in_category(array(###)))  { 
echo '';
} ?>

where ### is the category ID

In this case, tab = link styled like a tab using ul/li. nothing is hidden, just poor semantics for those in the industry. (i initially thought it was the same thing and was gonna link to one of the "content in hidden tabs gets less credit" posts that have been going around the past few days)

The overall value of the page increases.

1. You have more highly relevant content added to the page which improves the number of long tail keywords the page will rank for as well as improve the relevancy score for all "This Is Our Youth" related terms.

From a user perspective, if I wanted to see a show, I'd want to know who the cast is, see a video trailer/review and get venue info.

2. You keep the authority on that page instead of splitting off to several other subpages. This means more ranking power stays on the single page and it will rank better overall.

In TheaterMania's case, each tab is a link to another page, not hidden divs.

2-sided coin.

If you make it a single page, you will probably rank better for "This Is Our Youth" keywords overall.

However, if there is significant keyword traffic volume for "This Is Our Youth Videos" and "This Is Our Youth Cast", you might get better ranking by developing each of these pages out further (more content).

As they stand now, I recommend moving all the content onto one single page and make the tabbed navigation just scroll down to the appropriate part of the page.

My guess is that the port number version of the URL is what will start appearing in SERPs.

https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:%22:8080%22

I would remove the canonical tag if possible.

Looks like it worked.. all the newly cached pages don't have those breadcrumbs. To speed up the process, I'd resubmit your sitemaps.

Search engines can't tell the difference so all good.

Cool cool. No breadcrumb code but it still shows up. My guess is that it assumes the » implies a breadcrumb. Try changing that to something else... | or > ... and see if it goes away.

Sounds like its picking up breadcrumbs and displaying those instead. Care to share the URL?

I see his concern but think it may be unwarranted. If you are going to be getting rid of the microsites, then the 301 redirect would be the way to go to conserve all of the authority you built to them. Unless the microsites were penalized, you should be fine.

Another alternative is to leave the microsites up, copy the content over to your site and set up canonicals pointing to the new location of the content. This would transfer over the authority while keeping the microsites live.