What is an SEO silo structure?

The two approaches can be combined.

Grouping content by topic helps search engines and users understand how pages relate, gives each topic a clear entry point, and concentrates internal links within a subject. A topic page that links to every supporting page, and supporting pages that link back, is still a good pattern.

Strict silo advice says never link between topics, to avoid 'leaking' relevance. In practice that blocks useful navigation: a reader of a guide on canonical tags may need the redirects guide next. Google's guidance focuses on helpful internal linking, and there is no evidence that sensible cross-topic links harm rankings. Deep folder hierarchies also create long URLs and make reorganisation costly.

Use hubs for each main topic, with every supporting page linking to its hub and to closely related pages, including across topics where a reader would go next. Keep URLs short and stable; folder structure can reflect broad sections without encoding every level. On serionflow.com, guides sit under /guides with hub pages for each family, and related links are chosen by relevance rather than strict topic boundaries.

Large sites with many unrelated product lines or audiences can benefit from clearer separation, so that navigation and internal links stay relevant. Multi-brand or multi-language sites also need clean grouping. Even then, link across groups where it helps the user.

A quick test for any structure: pick five pages at random and ask whether a reader finishing each one has an obvious, linked next step, and whether each page can be reached from its topic page in one click. If either answer is no, the problem is linking, not silo depth, and adding relevant links fixes it faster than restructuring URLs. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for restructuring your existing site's URLs and navigation.