Silo structure and use of Schema code

[Collieman]

Hello

I have always thought that the idea of siloing your content made good sense. To me it was similar to a library arranging their books by category. Whether it worked or not in terms of improving our rankings is unclear but overall I did feel it was useful for both visitors and bots.

If we set aside the question of how visitors might regard it and concentrate purely on the benefit for search engines then my question is this:

Siloing was introduced to help identify what the topic was and improve relevancy. Now that we have schema.org is it largely redundant and which schema tags would you suggest are the best for replacing it?

Thank you for your help and consideration

Colin

[Robert Charlton]

Very quick comment, as I think it's a great question.

I'm a proponent of siloing too... perhaps limited siloing as opposed to extremely strict siloing... but organizing your site in a way that helps both users and Google.

I don't think that schema tags will replace that site organization, though, nor will they replace aspects of structure and visitor behavior which come naturally from that organization. That surface organization is necessarily important.

To use the library analogy... suppose you put the books anywhere, but guided library visitors by little wireless tags embedded in books that you could find with a smart phone. That might ultimately identify all the books in a category, but the browsing experience would be less than satisfactory... and the paths through the library wouldn't be efficient.

[Awarn]

Your library analogy is good. To simply browse through a library would make the experience poor but if you specifically knew the book you were looking for the experience would be fast and good.

I see schema as more of a theory yet. It is a great idea however I don't really see the search engines really picking it up in real life yet. It strikes me as one of Google's "we recommend this" ideas but we won't really use it in the search until a lot of people implement it. Sad thing is I think it could really help especially for people using mobile devices.

[roshaoar]

I don't know. I've seen a very VERY large SEO benefit from using breadcrumb markup. I think it explains sites and categories to the big G. Perhaps this make Google think "hey this guy has 10 articles under the "superweird widget" category, maybe he knows what he's talking about regarding superweird widgets'. I used to always silo sites religiously but this really is much more powerful.

I also suspect things like this maybe why some of the large sites do better than small sites nowadays. Many of the large sites already use breadcrumb structure properly, it's in their CMS systems, so they already have this benefit. Simply put they have a better website and structure than small sites do. So rather than blaming Google for favouring them, outdo them instead.

Turn your smallness into an advantage. Your site is smaller so it's easier and faster to do whole site changes :). Just for the record, the usual gang used to outrank me (ebay,amazon) for my weird subject matter. Not anymore. Traffic up 250% in a week. Search up 300%

[EditorialGuy]

I've seen a very VERY large SEO benefit from using breadcrumb markup. I think it explains sites and categories to the big G. Perhaps this make Google think "hey this guy has 10 articles under the "superweird widget" category, maybe he knows what he's talking about regarding superweird widgets'.

Pagination (using link rel="prev" and link rel="next") can help, too, if you have a lot of multi-page articles or entities. Let's say that you have a seven-page article about doughnuts which is broken down as follows:

Doughnuts - Introduction
Cake doughnuts
Yeast-raised doughnuts
Crullers
Beignets
Fritters
Related baked goods

When you link those pages together with link rel="prev" and link rel="next", you help Google to see that the article is a single, in-depth entity and not just a collection of unrelated pages. It's a win-win: The article as a whole becomes stronger in Google's eyes, yet the individual pages about cake doughnuts, beignets, etc. continue to be indexed and ranked for their specific topics.

To put it another way, pagination is a kind of "siloing" that can be used with or separately from schema markup. (So far, the combination of the two seems to be working for us.)