Pillar Page

Write several articles on one topic and they compete with each other. Given ten pieces on similar ground from one site, a search engine can't settle which one represents the topic.

Pagedeck's blog was in that position. Twelve articles covered organizing meeting notes, and for the query "how to write meeting notes" a different one ranked each month, with none reaching the first page. Perfectly decent articles were splitting each other's position, and adding a thirteenth would have split it further.

A pillar page puts one central article on top of those twelve. It covers the whole topic broadly, hands the details off to the existing articles, and ties them together with links. To a search engine it says this page represents the topic; to a reader it says where to start.

Five things go in.

1. The topic and the query — pick one broad term. Not something narrow like "meeting notes template," but "how to write meeting notes," which names the whole topic. Narrow terms belong to the supporting articles, one term each.
2. The outline — cover every branch of the topic. For meeting notes, that's what to record, when to record it, who records, and where it gets stored. Leave one branch empty and the reader goes to another site.
3. Links out to supporting articles — summarize each branch in two or three paragraphs and send the detail to its own article. Put everything into the central page and it's too long for anyone to finish.
4. Links back in — the supporting articles link to the pillar too. With links running one way only, a search engine won't read them as a set. That linked structure is a topic cluster.
5. Updating — a central article isn't written once. Revise the outline and links whenever a supporting article is added. A pillar that stops getting updated starts reading as thin content — summary with nothing behind it.

"Twelve articles on this topic and no pillar. Let's write the central one first."

Scattered articles need a representative page to gather them.

"Don't put all the detail in the pillar. Hand it to the supporting articles and just link."

Keeping the central page's job to summary and connection.

"The links back from the supporting articles to the pillar are missing."

Links run one way, so the set doesn't hold together.

Ravi wrote one central article on meeting notes. He built an outline of four branches, summarized each in three paragraphs, and linked to eight of the twelve existing articles. The remaining four overlapped too much, so they were merged into the central page and their addresses were pointed at it. Two months later the pillar reached the first page for the target query, and visits to the eight supporting articles rose along with it.