Watching and analyzing... trying to determine exactly how important your site is!

When Google spiders are analyzing your blog, a big part of their ranking criteria revolves around RELEVANCE. How "relevant" is your site for a specific search.

Now the odd thing is that the relevance of your page is not just determined by the content on the page itself. Sure Google takes the content itself into account, BUT of larger importance is what pages are linking to that specific page.

So if you have a page about dog collars, Google will give that page higher ranking in it's index when there are other related pages linking to that page.

What is a "related" page?

A page does not necessarily have to be about dog collars to be related to your dog collar page. Google expects this.

Google use a concept known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine how relevant your page is based on what pages are linking to it.

Google takes into account the dog collar pages linking to your page, and using LSI, they also factor in pages that are tightly related to dog collars such as:

A “Silo” is a way to organize your website or blog’s internal linking structure to direct and control the flow of PageRank and authority throughout the site.

It organizes your pages so they follow a natural LSI-type progression from the broad topic home page, to a niche topic category page, and finally to the specific topic post page.

The importance and authority of each page is increased by the related page linking to it.

 

This design is based on a traditional structure outlined by Charles Heflin.

The arrows are showing how the pages link to each other.

Notice how each post page only has only one incoming link and one outgoing link. This increases the RELEVANCE of the text on the page, AND prevents each page from bleeding PR to unrelated pages and external links.

This alone will make each page appear more important and pertinent in the eyes of Google.

 

Ok, So If Silo's Are So Great,
Then Why Isn't Everone Doing It?

The answer is time!

Normally converting your site or blog into a silo involves tedious reorganization of the site structure and editing of the HTML code for your pages. This is extremely time consuming and difficult, especially for large sites.

Because of this, I created the Virtual Silo plugin.

Virtual Silo enables the average blog owner to get the most benefit from a Silo structure without the headache and frustration that goes along with manually converting your site.

 

How Does Virtual Silo Accomplish This?

Virtual Silo uses Google's own "nofollow" tag.

The plugin strategically adds the "nofollow" tag to specific links on your blog to mimick a hardcoded silo. The nofollow tag tells Google how to channel and direct PR and authority for your blog home page, category pages and post pages.

Here Is An Outline Of The Structure That Virtual Silo Creates:

• Your blog home page links only to category pages.
  
  
• Blog category pages link only to the first post in that category, or to the sub-category.
  
  
• Sub-category page will link to the first post in that sub-category.
  
  
• Each post page will link to the next post.
  
  
• When no additional posts remain, the last post page will then link to the next category.