Silo-ing in 2019 - is it worth to restructure a website?

[casinoFM]

Good Morning fellow Affiliates,

when i started my website i basically just published articles about all kinds of casino and lotto related content and kept my fingers crossed that these would somehow rank. Now i have something like 250 posts and sites, and most of them rank for the designated keywords or at least have the potential to do so in the future (and maybe with a little bit more links and love).

Since in the beginning i didnt really think about my site structure/architecture, today all articles are like this:
mywebsite.com/article-1
mywebsite.com/article-2
mywebsite.com/article-3

Silo-ing - or having major categories - like eg:

mywebsite.com/casinos/article-1
mywebsite.com/casino-bonus/article-2
mywebsite.com/knowledge/article-3

did not come to my mind back then. But in the last year quite often i came accross articles, podcasts and blog post showing the potential of these categories (and the linking within these silos) to improve my seo-friendlyness.

But i am also quite afraid of the risk of loosing traffic or doing other harm to my site. Besides that many resources about silo-ing are clearly outdated and a few years old, so i am not sure if this is such an important thing at all in 2019.

Whats your opinion about Silo-ing? If it is not broken, dont fix it? Or definatly a strategy that works out? Maybe one of you guys restructured his site and can share his experience?

Super excited to hear your opinions!

[universal4]

Well, IMO, it depends on whether the changes you are considering make it easier for the visitor to find the articles they are looking for, or help them read about specific types of content.

Cross linking similar articles may help robots slightly find more within a category or content type, but as long as they have indexed the content they know it exists and where it is, but making it more helpful to the visitors might help with time on site, or help your site answer the questions the visitor came to your site with.

Rick
Universal4

[Former Member 14]

Honestly, if you spend your time worrying about new-trends, especially those mentioned at sites which tend to target mainstream SEO, then you'll make yourself go crazy. In the past I've had a few mainstream sites, and they ranked very well. However, using the same SEO principles on my casino portals have never been very successful.

My main objectives these days are:

• Serve fast loading pages (anything above 1.5sec is too slow)
• Provide quality content (better having 10 pages of useful content, than 50 pages of mediocre fluff)
• Use internal link structures that aren't spammy
• Link to authoritative content (dofollow)
• Target a couple of keywords and longtail phrases on each page

Personally, if it's not broken, don't fix it.That's my advice

Food for thought... I wont mention names, but there's a couple of affiliates who use Microsoft-Word to code their websites (have done for years). These are not mobile optimized, and frankly, they look like something the cats dragged in.... But they rank, and they're making these guys money. Which at the end of the day, that's what being an affiliate is about, making cash.

If everything we're feed made a huge world of difference, then these sites wouldn't rank.

I've got a couple of new sites about ready to be developed. And I'm really thinking if they need WP. I don't blog, so it seems pointless and overkill using WP. Instead, I'm leaning towards bespoke php, and even using a DB based on flat-files, if I need it. WP has become very popular for those who can't code.

[DanHorvat]

Personally I'm splitting my category with various betting advice into ~10 categories.

E.g. Betting Mathematics. So a person who's into numbers (not everyone is) can read this cat to find out all about odds comparison, bonus EV, juice, probability and other stuff.

And I'm doing it for the sake of users.

With such specific cats, you can list them on the front page in such a way that many articles are "fresh", whereas with only one cat only the top 3-4 are and it would be a mess of topics. One of the main rules is to not confuse the user.

I'd assume Google would value a site that has specific cats more than one with one cat /betting as every single site with poor content has that.

You can't build a quality website without proper structure. Structure creates the UX.

Bet365 wouldn't get very far if they had a list of all matches without sport/league cats, or if all their bet markets were one giant sheet.

With 250 articles, you do need categories. For users, not for Google.

[Former Member 14]

You can't build a quality website without proper structure. Structure creates the UX.

I'm not saying "cats" aren't important, been using them for years. But it all rides on the type of site you have. A sportsbook portal, well there's oodles of categories, it would make sense to leverage those options. One size doesn't fit all is what I'm saying

[gil.langelaan]

Personally, if it's not broken, don't fix it.That's my advice

That's the point.
You'll lose more than earn after restructuring sites that already performs well.
You should consider siloing for new websites, depends on the market conjuncture

[Genie]

250 posts sounds hard to navigate. I would create some category pages with unique text on them. Then you can start targeting those pages with links (internal or external) to power all the posts in the specific category.

[casinoFM]

250 posts sounds hard to navigate. I would create some category pages with unique text on them. Then you can start targeting those pages with links (internal or external) to power all the posts in the specific category.

Thank you! Thats exactly what we are going to do. The posts themself will keep their url, but we will create 6 categories and display the articles there.
For my next projects however i will spend more time in site structure....was a good lesson to learn

[idhebat]

i'm big yes for it. On pages seo get reward more by search engine.

this just my advice based on what i'm doing.
crawled your website using screaming frog (500 crawl limit on free lisence), or just get all the post url.
decides a parent topic / silo pages for each post
Setup internal linking for each post to the parent topic