No need for a blank canvas for info articles. Keep it looking natural and include the nav bar etc.

I still consider word count when creating articles. The way I determine the best article length is looking at the SERPs. Look at results on page 1 for the keyword you are targeting. What is the average length of the top 5 articles? That will give a good indicator of optimal article length. You can find out more details of how I determine article length here.

Would you recommend a blank canvas? No nav bar, no anything just a blank page (like a piece of paper) with an article on and one link to the money page?

At what point does the wordcount length stop mattering? Is it better to do 1000 words on the supporting article than 500? Or does the word count not really matter past 500 words?

The reason for an article like “top 5 restaurants in Fresno” is to establish topical relevance for the local area of Fresno. On the flip side, you can also write an article on “best roof tiles” to increase topical relevance around Roofing.

A third option is to write a supporting article that has topical relevance for Roofing AND Fresno. Eg “How to insulate your roof from that Fresno summer heat”. It his topical relevance for BOTH roofing and Fresno.

You can use a combination of all three options.

You want to include links to these supporting pages somewhere. In the example above, I have a money page targeting top protein supplements. The supporting articles can be posts I’ve written and included in blog section of my site, all pointing back to that money page.

Thanks Matt for the awesome post. It keeps me on fire. : )

If we just create 4-5 supporting pages (without any links to them), wouldn’t these pages be called orphan pages? Is there any concern?

Each supporting article should have its own individual target keyword related to the main page it is supporting.

In your example, your main page is trying to rank for “music lessons”. You supporting pages would cover topics like “lesson costs”, or blog posts topics such as “how to read music”, or “how to learn guitar”. These supporting pages would have their own target keywords. However, all of these supporting pages would link back to your main page, ideally with optimized anchor text.

Example: My main page that I want to rank promotes music lessons. This page is ~1,000 words of quality content with a target keyword of “music lessons” and its synonyms.

Now I create 4 supporting articles such as “How to find the best music lessons near you?” and so on.
– “best music lessons” is the focus keyword of this article, right?
– Can I link this target keyword to my main page?

In this case, it wasn’t an issue. The reason I used these articles was just to illustrate a point. Of course, you could/should write articles like “Top 5 Surgeries Performed in Oakland”.

“All I did was throw-up 4 (random-ass) articles that talked about Oakland and linked them to his landing page.”

Regarding the above, how do you make it look relevant when linking back to a landing page when you have an article talking about ‘best hotels in xxxx’ on a surgeon’s website ? Isn’t this a flag to Google?

Thanks

In general, the things in SEO that stop working (or are in danger of it) are tricks designed to manipulate the algorithm. Topic relevance is about giving the search engine a super clear picture of your subject. As time goes on, you might need to go less ‘out of your way’ to help the search engines understand what your thrust is but I don’t believe you’ll ever see it stop working.

Saad,

This really isn’t a technique. It’s a concept that will completely change your SEO game. Yes, it still does work and if you can understand it well, you will have a lot of success.

You’re on the right track, Tim!

Regards

You absolutely do need to worry about it. Come up with original content for your supporting topics.

What if the content in the supporting article is already covered in the main page, do I need to worry about keyword cannibalization?

Cheers!

These days I’m making sure each piece of content will target some keywords. So the word count will depend on the SERP.

Doesn’t matter.

Thanks

If you don’t want to rank them, then no need to send juice there. If you do want rank them, then link to them.

Doesn’t matter.

Should the page urls of the support pages be similar to the landing page?

Definitely. Check out my article on The Black Sheep.

Do you find that in some cases it’s necessary to build links to the supporting page for the effect to happen?

Hey Kumar. Welcome aboard.

1) I wouldn’t sweat it. Lack of navigation just means its hard to navigate from the page. Doesn’t mean its not authentic.
2) More like 2% less effective.
3) Never hurts to be safe, but I think you’re preping for the 2020 algorithm. 🙂 Right now the algo is very much still robotic and isn’t as clever as you might think.

Found you through your recent Authority Hacker podcast and have been following you since. I’m really impressed by your expertise yet down-to-earth and honest communication style!

Question:

I am a getting a bit OCD about white-hat. (Or maybe that should read “paranoid about doing anything Google may penalize”!)

1) Don’t you think that removing navigation and sidebars looks a bit dodgy? Might Google cotton on to these pages not being “authentic” and therefore discounting them?

2) If I make 4 supporting articles that are useful for real people, including the normal navigation and sidebar etc, but add a single contextual link to money page, how much less effective would this be? 70% 50% 10%?

3) Should I quit being so pedantic about “real users” and white hat? 😉

Cheers, mate.

K

I’d do them separately.

Ok now this is my question
If suppose I want to rank ,my city SEO and my city web design on 2 different pages – should I create topical relevance for SEO and web design separately targeting these 2 pages… In general if we want to create topical relevance for 2 different pages , should we just create topical relevant content separately

Let me know how it works , Thanks

If you want to rank the supporting articles, you can.

Can the money page also link to the four supporting articles (assuming they are valuable), or is it important that the links only go one way, from the supporting articles to the money page?

Nice… glad to hear.

If the homepage is about hair, you’re going to have a really hard time making a subtopic about face care. I wouldn’t bother. Create a new site for that.

Thanks for your reply.
My website is a branded name as it started out as a personal blog (no “hair” in my domain name). But the entire homepage is about hair care, as well as the menu and the categories. Do I have to revamp the homepage content and/or just start publishing “face care” content ?
Thanks again,

a) Sure
b) Depends. What is your homepage name and topic about? That kind of defines the breadth capability of your site.
c) See b.

I have a question regarding your example #1

Let’s say I have a good website on hair care.
Would the supporting articles technique work if I want to rank for :
A) “hair dye” related keywords ? (I have a few articles on hair color but not as strong as my dry hair care main expertise) (considering that it’s not too competitive)
B) “face care” related keywords ?
Ultimately, I’d like my website to switch from being an authority hair care blog to a more “general beauty” authoritarive portal (over time, I know it’s a lot of work :), including face care, nails, etc. etc.
C) Do you think I should keep my website strictly hair care and start another one about let’s say nail care ? Or can I use the authority I’ve built on my hair care website and work slowly to “expand” the topics ?

Thanks in advance for your insight.

Absolutely!

Great article! You mention that establishing topical relevance can be very useful for website who want to rank for something new. Does this also approach also help websites who want to rank for something they have always been trying to rank for, but have not been too successful at it?

For example, a travel agent offering holidays in France, if they created supporting content specifically about France, is this likely to help? Or does it apply more for websites trying to establish themselves for something new?

Yep, I do!

We all know that permalinks should not have any date on them so the content is basically “timeless” – still, and considering that it would be too much of a task to change permalinks structure – do you think that linking old posts (with prior dates) to new ones could also have this effect of establishing topical relevance? Thanks.

Never tried.

Would that work with indexed PDFs instead of pages?

Just from the children to the parents.

Should we interlink all the 4 supporting articles with each other? Or just link the parent to the child pages and vice versa?

Cheers

Great.
Have implemented your ideas. Hope to share results in the near future.

Overthinking it. Don’t worry about all that.

You can, but its optional. Unnecessary.

Amazing info here that honestly not a lot of SEO’s know about and actually implement.

I’m a little confused on the part where you said not to have the supporting articles linking to other pages via footers, sidebar etc.

So when I create the new supporting page I need to disable the footer links on that page so it doesn’t link to anything but the money page?

Thanks 🙂

I’ll test this!
P.S: Please let me go from apprentice to SEO expert following you! Best regards.

It’s a complicated question and it depends on your niche, competition, need for topical relevance, keyword volume, etc. There’s no one size fits all.

I currently have my homepage (page), 4 “best product” pillar articles (posts), and a variety of supplementary reviews/tips/etc. (posts). I link the homepage to pillar 1, which links to a post->post->post and then to the 2nd pillar. This continues until the final post (under the 4th pillar) which then links back to the homepage completing the circle.

If a keyword got to 4-5 without any topical relevance, then it would definitely help.

Would it help keywords on page 1 (maybe position 4-5)? Thanks.

It’s getting too complicated for me to determine a single reason for each update. I think they’re becoming increasingly complex and could have to do with a multitude of ranking factors.

Thanks Matt for your quick answer. Want to know from your experience, What was the reason of Google Fred plenty? Did you get any(or 3-5 points) specific reasons?

Topical relevance is 1 of 1000 things you need to be doing. If this is the one thing that your site needs, then sure, it will fix it.

Will it work? What do you think? Or I should stick only one topic? Or I should abandon this site?(It will hurt because this website have more than 200 article).
Please share your opinion.

Different alltogher. Onsite signals != offsite signals.

Great post Matt! Following this comment by Jones, I was wondering if building these supporting pages are as strong as building backlinks? And what would be your strategy? Eg. Build 1 page, 1 PBN, check rank, repeat?

You have an optimization problem on your main page.

Your main page is probably over or under optimized.

Doesn’t matter.

Let’s say I’m trying to rank for the “best laptop”
Should the articles be about:
“how to use a laptop”, “laptop vs desktop computer”, “best remote mouse for laptop” , “what are laptop netsticks”

OR

“Dell X123 Laptop Review”
“HP Laptop Version ABC”

I think that option 1 will be much better, but what do you think?
If you also think that option 1 is better, do you think that option 2 still has any effect?

Thanks.

I noindex my tag, category and archive pages anyways so I don’t need to consider this variable.

I’ve recently been giving this a lot of thought.

My site about “Technical Service” has a structure that looks like this:

/technical-service
/technical-service/more-specific-1/
/technical-service/more-specific-2/
/technical-service/cost/
/technical-service/quote/
/technical-service/defined/
/technical-service/infographic/

The above are all static pages, but then what happens when you also have /blog/ with similar names as your service pages, like this:

/blog/category/technical-service/
/blog/category/technical-service-more-specific-1/
/blog/category/technical-service-more-specific-2/
/blog/technical-article-about-technical-service/

The blog gets all the links, but from people in the industry who link back, but would not likely convert into customers.

Would you simply continue this structure and ignore the possible cannibalization of the category pages competing with the services pages?

Ofcourse I will!

I implemented this technique on 2 different sites, 2 different kws, I actually already had supporting articles live but they were linking only from relatedposts/menus.

Added contexual links to both and they indexed pretty quick, no results yet but I’m waiting.

Awesome. Please share the results when you get them.

Well yeah, I started testing when I wrote this reply.
Added contexual links to all of the related pages, lets see what gonna happen.

The only way to know is to test, but I can save you the time… it’s not enough.

There’s definitely diminishing returns. What point that kicks in at? I have no idea.

Would you say that there is a cap to the amount of topical relevancy you can have from supporting pages? Say, 100 supporting pages?

Just curious from your experience what your best guess is.

Thanks Matt.

You can certainly double-up.

What if you’re trying to rank 2 different money pages that are similar in service/product?

Example: black husky dog 1 and white husky dog 2

Would you link out to both from the same 4 pages or would you create 4 specific pages for each money page?

Thanks!

I would test all variations to see which works best.

Thanks for the reply! Would you link the silo to the homepage (where the linking post shows up) or to the actual linking post?

Could be. Sounds like a good setup for a test. Be sure to share your findings. 🙂

Create a new Google account and add it there.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the reply . The site was build an an expired domain (clean domain niche related, a few backlinks all branded anchors). My concern is that after fixing the keyword stuff the site doesn`t show any signs of recovery and I know it`s not recommended to add it to Search Console when you have client sites in there as i don`t want any association of good sites with penalized sites. I have other gmail accounts but my location is the same and Google can easily see that. I want to add the site to Search Console to get in touch with Google (my guess is that since the site was hit entirely it could be a manual penalty). I have also read your article about double 301`s but i don`t understand exactly why just one 301 won`t work

Any recommendations as to what i should do with the site ? It has a great potential and i don`t want to lose it. Thanks in advance

Note: Keyword stuffing a single page is unlikely to cause a sitewide problem. In addition to that, there is no situation where keyword stuffing would be un-recoverable. Best of luck.

Thanks Matt. One final question :

I have an affiliate site who has one page which was accidentally keyword-stuffed (by having too many very similar keywords). I have fixed the issues and now i`m waiting to see if it will be back . Despite having just one page with problems the entire site was affected. My question to you is this :

In case the site won`t recover can i buy a new domain copy-paste the content to it and then do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new domain?

A lot of people do this but it seems it`s a big debate as to whether or not a 301 redirect will pass the penalty. What`s your opinion ?

Only to the money page.

So you do interlink the pages like “Oakland A” links contextually to “oakland B and all of them link to the target page ? That`s what i`m trying to understand.

Contextual links are the 80-20 portion of it.

As always superb article. A quick question for you though

When you say “make sure that supporting pages about ABC topic will link only to other pages about ABC topic” do you mean contextual links like for eample ?

“Oakland Nightlife Review” supporting page links to “Best Restaurants in Oakland” page (contextually) AND to the target city page while the “Best Restaurants In Oakland” links back to the “Oakland Nightlife Review” and also links to the target city page OR you link from the supporting pages JUST to the target city page (contextually) while the supporting pages will “connect to each other” just by using the custom sidebar ?

Thanks

Thanks, T-Diddy. You’re the man.