Field Notes: 

How the Silo Talks to Itself

By the time Cluster came along, Connect had more than proved itself, and all two hundred and fifty pages were finally living on Pages. 

But a site that size brings its own problem: that is a lot of pages to work through one at a time. And Connect, for all it does well, was only ever looking in one direction. Point it at a page and it shows you everywhere that should be linking in to it. What it couldn't do was pull back and show me the silo as a whole, how every page in a cluster linked across to its neighbours, and which of my strongest pages were sitting on equity they should have been passing sideways.

I'd already done the strategic groundwork. Google Search Console data told me which pages were strongest on traffic and position, and I'd shaped the whole site into five defined silos to push authority where it needed to go. Breadcrumbs had the vertical covered, the links back up each silo. What I couldn't see was the sideways: whether the pages within a silo were linking to each other the way they should.

So, the same move as ever. I took the problem to the team: I need to see how a silo networks within itself, and how the strongest pages bring their siblings up by association. A couple of days later, we had Lennon Tree Cluster.

It works simply. You pick a domain from the sites you've claimed in Lennon Tree, you give it the silo parent, and it builds a matrix of every page in that cluster, down one side and across the top, each cell showing how many times one page links to another. The blanks are your opportunities. The blocks of colour are where the linking already works. In one screen you get an exact priority list of what to fix and in what order, and that is weeks of guesswork gone.

Cluster is the newest branch on the tree, grown only last week, in the thick of the silo work that called for it. In a single afternoon, I had fixed a 26-page silo, connecting relevant pages to one another, before branching out relevant pages in one cluster to those from other clusters. Tomorrow I'll fix another, effortlessly. Like shelling peas, so says the Yorkshireman.

Lennon Tree Cluster is not yet available for external use, but between it and Lennon Tree Connect, we have finally solved the problem of internal linking bottlenecks. 

- The Gardener. 2026-06-22.