Silo URL Architecture

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2021 and adapted it to English in 2026.

I want to talk a bit about what has worked best for me with URL architecture for SEO niches, focused especially on Amazon niche sites, both my own and clients'. But first...

What's better for SEO?

Links!

Link building is still the cornerstone of every SEO strategy. No matter how much people say content is king: no link, no party.

And keeping your link building strategy simple (natural, in Google's eyes) is key to avoiding penalties.

You'll see why I'm starting with this. First, a bit of context:

What Ranks Better: Amazon Micro Niches or Generalist Sites? #

Today, Amazon micro niches are still better, if you want to rank fast and keep the niche for a while.

But a big site that pulls in some traffic sells better than a micro niche...

It gives the buyer more confidence, because they think they can keep growing it. With a micro niche, they see the ceiling sooner.

Most buyers think they won't be able to grow it further, or they don't want to put more money into it.

But when it's a mega niche... well, they think that by investing €500 more in content they can rank for more keywords and get more traffic.

So the only reason to venture into building an Amazon mega niche is how easy it is to sell later on.

But if the site specializes in one thing, it'll be tougher in the SERPs than a generalist one. The only catch you'll notice is when it's time to sell it, because of the popular saying that "when someone sells you a niche, it's because they've already squeezed everything they could out of it."

What about building good child verticals on a generalist site?

If you build good silos and clusters inside the generalist site, it climbs the SERPs nicely when you create architectures like this:

generalsite.com/coffee-makers           <- Pillar page (content + clusters)
generalsite.com/coffee-makers/drip      <- Post
generalsite.com/coffee-makers/nespresso <- Post
generalsite.com/coffee-makers/the-rest  <- Post

The problem with that, though, is how well Google can tell that you're talking about a different coffee maker. In other words: drip coffee maker. Maybe Google still doesn't get the difference from plain "coffee maker".

And you run the risk of ending up with 15 coffee maker pages competing with each other, cannibalizing.

It's not that this doesn't happen on a single-topic niche site. The difference is that you can always point to the homepage, which will be about coffee makers: Google will accept it, and users can segment themselves from there.

On a generalist site, you can point to the /coffee-makers/ category, and you might get the same effect, except link building gets a whole lot more complicated.

Remember how I started by talking about links? Link building is easier on a small niche.

On an Amazon mega niche, it would be the same as with the micro niche, except link building is more complex: you need more links to cover more categories, from topical websites that specialize in the category you're pointing each backlink to, so you expose the domain to more possible penalties.

Remember: the more links you have pointing to your niche, the higher the odds of getting caught by Google and penalized.

Which URL Architecture for SEO Niches Works Best? #

Sometimes we assume the SERPs favor big websites just because they rank first... But a lot of the time it's the webmasters' minimalism that's to blame.

What do I mean?

A website with URLs like:

mycoffeemakers.com/espresso
mycoffeemakers.com/dolce-gusto

has the wrong URL architecture. The myth that Google likes short URLs is still popular, but nothing could be further from the truth: Google likes URLs that make sense and follow the website's structure.

In the hypothetical case I'm describing, Google isn't clearly reading "espresso coffee makers", let alone "dolce gusto coffee makers".

Generalist sites make that clearer by having URLs like:

generalsite.com/coffee-makers/espresso

For a single-topic niche site to work well, it has to use:

mycoffeemakers.com/espresso-coffee-makers

The clearer you make it to Google in the slug what the page is, the sooner you'll start seeing positive changes.

The impression that generalist sites building mini verticals inside the mega niche now do better comes from the fact that their URL structure (because of the shape of the niche) is the way it SHOULD be.

Redirects: Is It Worth Filling a Micro Niche with Redirects to Clean Up the URL Structure? #

Short answer: yes.

Say you buy a micro niche (or you're reading this and you own one like this) with a bad URL structure, for example:

myhairstraightener.com/ionic
myhairstraightener.com/tourmaline

A good optimization after buying it would be to add "hair-straighteners" to every URL (with their redirects) to give all the URLs "order", or rather, a logical structure.

The URLs would end up like this:

myhairstraightener.com/ionic-hair-straighteners
myhairstraightener.com/tourmaline-hair-straighteners

But aren't I repeating the keyword I'm already targeting with the domain?

No.

You're not.

These days Google reads domains as "brand names" rather than as part of the URL. (If you don't believe me, submit a site with good content and a random domain, targeting a keyword that isn't in the content, for AdSense review, and watch it get approved, no questions asked.)

The slug it ends up reading is the part after the slash, and that's why it's important to spell out there what the heck you're talking about.