Big WordPress Sites = Bad Authority Distribution

August 31st, 2011 | 9 comments

wordpress internal link structure Over the past few days I’ve been working on transferring all content from my old Germany tourism site to my newly designed Germany tourism site. The old one ran on a basic html template. The new one runs on WordPress.

Aside from the same ol hassles like setting up redirects etc. I came across one thing that if not taken care of could cause a big problem. The problem is in the internal linking structure my WordPress theme (and most others) has. There is no problem if you have a small site with maybe 50 pages or less, but I plan on adding alot of content and will end up having several hundred posts.

So why is that such a problem? That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked It’s a problem because the more posts you publish, the further down your older posts go. First they drop off the front page, which reduces the amount of authority that is pointing to them. Then they roll off the second page… even less authority and so on.

But we also have categories and they are crucial in authority distribution. However, the category pages pose the same threat, only on a smaller scale. The more posts that are published in a particular category, the more posts fall off the first category page.

So having an even authority distribution among all of your posts is difficult. You could just link to the second, third fourth etc. category pages, but that’s not really user friendly (most will wonder what the heck these links are) and even if it was it’s still not ideal since it is all duplicate content.

So, the best solution I’ve come up with so far is to do three things:

1. Get a good related posts plugin to show related posts under every post.
2. Show a list of your more important posts in the sidebar.
3. Show only post summaries to reduce duplicate content and increase the number of posts shown on each category page.

That’s what I’ve done so far and I think I’m getting pretty close to the optimum internal linking structure, but I don’t’ feel like I’m there yet.

And a word on sitemaps since I know everyone is going to jump on that… sitemaps are good for getting large sites indexed, but they don’t increase the authority of any page. So while it might not be a bad idea to have one figuring out a good internal linking structure is an overall solution, while sitemaps are only a solution to one particular issue.

So what do you think? Have you come across this issue? How did you resolve it?

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9 comments

Leo Dimilo (1 comments.)
31st August, 2011 at 4:02 pm

Hey Josh,

Another solution is to use pages rather than posts as top level silos for each of your categories, and then populate the top level with your category channel groupings…add custom menus for each topical category and add a hook for the navigational panel to display only relevant stuff within each category.

It’s a pain to start up but is worth it in the long run.

I have recently gone away from the post and only add post related stuff for news and when I want to boost internal links from the top.

Just my .02 though. Been playing around with wordpress and large site infrastructures for a while now.
karin (1 comments.)
31st August, 2011 at 6:55 pm

Social bookmarking will help here also. By regularly bookmarking some of your older posts, those pages will continue to rank well and get traffic. I get comments regularly on posts I wrote a long time ago.
Ian
1st September, 2011 at 5:25 am

The sales page at http://www.wordpresssiloplugin.com/ describes the dilution of themes and the loss of SE ranking for long tail phrases. Does their plugin address this issue?
Alexander (1 comments.)
5th September, 2011 at 6:44 am

I am building a big site based on WP now and have the same issue – what structure to use for the site that already has 20 categories and will have more.

I like the idea to use pages as a parent static pages for each category and use posts for internal linking. There is good article on this topic here: http://trafficcpanel.com/820/silo-structure-seo-method-that-lifts-the-pressure-off-link-building/
Geoff (1 comments.)
19th September, 2011 at 8:57 pm

In my experience there are 3 things which matter the most.

1. Fresh new content continuously. This will drive the most traffic to your site regularly.
2. Keyword optimized titles. These become part of the permalink in wordpress and make a huge difference in rankings.
3. Smart use of tags. These are a much better way to organize content than pages in my mind. They are dynamic and therefore don’t require building pages. WP automatically builds topic pages for you and now with the menu builder you can simply link to a topic page.

The All in One SEO plugin is well worth it too.
Darren McMillan (1 comments.)
24th September, 2011 at 11:32 pm

Now my sites been up for a year, my plan is to create a page called “Recommended reading” which lists the content I’ve written which I think people should read.

It’s something I’ve always wanted others to do, who have huge backlogs which I’ll never get the chance to read. Yet if they had some recommended articles from that backlog, I’d likely read them.
Ken Somerville
26th September, 2011 at 9:58 pm

I use WordPress and have found the same issues with drop-offs. Your article is excellent in addressing these issues, and the comments you’ve received have also been helpful with ways to get around them. Thank you. Your friend in Marketing. Ken Somerville
sudha (6 comments.)
12th October, 2011 at 5:51 am

Social bookmarking will help here also. By regularly bookmarking some of your older posts, those pages will continue to rank well and get traffic. I get comments regularly on posts I wrote a long time ago.
Tim Shirley (5 comments.)
23rd October, 2011 at 2:27 am

Great article and also very informative comments. I’m new to the Internet Marketing game and my sites are still fairly small but this info will be very helpful down the road.

Thanks Josh