Hi there! 👋

Today I'm sharing a note on what is silo structure in SEO and why it is important — especially for small sites.

Now, for the last week's news, Google's John Mueller stated that there's no relation between the number of articles in a blog and it's organic rankings.

So it's better to focus on the quality of blog posts rather than the quantity. 📈

Danielle Marshak (Product Manager at Google) also added new resources for site owners to help videos appear in Google Search and Discover.

If you're publishing videos, make sure your videos are available on a public web page, use VideoObject structured data markup, include high-quality thumbnails, and submit a video sitemap.

Now, let's get to this week's SEO tip... 💥

Siloing in SEO means grouping related pages together, either through internal linking or structurally, to establish the site's keyword-based themes.

It is important because a silo structure helps search engines better understand a website and all its content. That is why small niche sites with properly built silos can sometimes even outrank authority websites.

Now, to create a silo structure, you can start with a top silo page that will link down to child pages below it. The idea is to create closed ecosystems — groups of tightly related content.

Each silo (or group/category) can have between 10 to 100 posts each.

While internal linking also, you can link posts in one silo (or category) only to build topical relevance. This includes all internal links: in-content, sidebar, and footer links.

The basic site URL structure with silos in place looks like this: homepage > silo page > blog post.

Finally, silos work best when planned from the beginning. You can build it on an existing site as well, but it can require a good amount of work, depending on the site size.

You can read this and this to learn more about silo structure and its implementation.

• If copied content is ranking above the original content, DMCA takedowns can be used. But that is not a solution for long-term.
• So if copied content is consistently ranking above the original source, that may point to a overall site quality issue.

• Around February 19, Google started to show significantly fewer featured snippets in its search results.
• But now featured snippets are returned to normal levels.
• Google offered no clarification on this, but most likely, it was a bug related to featured snippets, which is now resolved.

• URL parameters (also known as "query strings") are a way to pass information about a click using the URL itself.
• While URL parameters are useful, they can cause many SEO issues, like: duplicate content, crawl budget loss, keyword cannibalization, diluted ranking signals, and poor URL readability.
• And most SEO issues arise when URLs containing parameters display duplicate, non-unique content.
• So to properly manage URL parameters: you can check your site crawl budget, keep consistent internal linking, canonicalize one version of the URL, or block crawlers via disallowing in robots.txt file.

• Orphaned pages are essentially any page on your site that doesn't have a link from ANY other page on your site.
• They're bad for SEO because orphaned pages may not get indexed, and even if Google finds them, they will have low link equity, and naturally, orphaned pages will struggle to rank.
• Causes of orphaned pages can be poor site structure, changes in the site navigation, or pages that are missed in a site migration.
• To find orphaned pages, you can look at external data sources like GSC (google search console), Google Analytics, and your site XML sitemaps.
• Finally, to fix orphaned pages, you can delete them if they are duplicate or thin content pages, include them in the site navigation if they're important pages, or redirect to a relevant page within the site if the orphan page has any backlinks.

• Google My Business (GMB) is a multi-layered Google's free local search marketing platform that enables you to submit information about local businesses, manage business reviews and questions, and publish photos, posts, or videos.
• As almost 50% of search queries now have a local intent, it's important to have a GMB profile for local businesses to rank in the search results.
• With a GMB profile, local businesses can manage Google business profiles, Google local packs, local finders, and maps.

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Until next week! :)

Saksham

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