Almost every roundup of pillar page examples recommends the same handful of pages, and several of them no longer exist. Before writing this, we opened every example we intended to use. Five well-known ones returned a 404, including Wine Folly's Wine 101, HubSpot's inbound marketing blog pillar, Drip's email marketing guide, Salesloft's demand generation page and Zapier's automation guide.
So the fifteen below are pages we loaded ourselves in August 2026. Each entry says what the page does structurally, because copying the format is more useful than admiring the design.
How we checked this list
Every URL was requested and screenshotted at 1440 by 900 in August 2026. Anything returning a 404 or redirecting away was removed and is named in the intro rather than quietly dropped. Where a company had moved a pillar to a new URL, we list the page that currently exists rather than the one other articles still link to.
The four pillar page structures
| Structure | What it looks like | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Guide | One long page, chaptered, read top to bottom | Foundational topics with a natural order |
| Hub | A short introduction linking out to many sub-pages | Large topics with many distinct subtopics |
| Resource library | Curated links, tools and templates by category | Topics where the value is in the collection |
| Glossary | Definitions, each linking to a deeper page | Topics with lots of jargon and search demand per term |
1. Ahrefs, SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners
A chaptered guide structure. One entry point, then numbered chapters each living on its own URL, with the pillar acting as the table of contents and the ranking page.
What to copy: the chapters are genuinely separate pages, so each one can rank for its own term while the pillar collects links for the head term. This is the cleanest version of the guide model on this list.
2. Moz, Beginner's Guide to SEO
The page that made this format standard practice, and still live years later. Chapter navigation, consistent depth per chapter, and a plain reading experience.
What to copy: its longevity. It has been updated repeatedly rather than replaced, which is why it still holds rankings. A pillar page is a maintenance commitment.
3. Backlinko, SEO Marketing Hub
A hub rather than a guide. Short framing, then a categorised set of links out to individual resources.
What to copy: the categorisation. Grouping by job to be done rather than alphabetically makes a large hub navigable, which is the failure mode of most resource pages.
4. HubSpot, What Is Inbound Marketing?
Worth noting that the version most listicles link to, on the blog, now returns a 404. The live pillar sits on the main site instead.
What to copy: the definitional opening. It answers the literal question in the first screen before expanding, which is what a page targeting a "what is" query has to do.
5. Atlassian, What is Agile?
A hub built around a coaching resource, covering the topic through many sub-pages with a consistent template.
What to copy: the tone. It teaches a methodology rather than selling a product, and the product case emerges from usefulness. This is why it earns links from people who will never buy Jira.
6. Semrush, How to do keyword research
A guide-format pillar on the blog rather than a separate hub, updated with a year in the title and a framework section.
What to copy: the framework. Giving readers a named, repeatable process makes a page quotable, and quotable pages get cited by other writers.
7. Hootsuite, social media strategy
Long-form with heavy use of headings, lists and tables to break up the text, plus a downloadable template as the conversion mechanism.
What to copy: the scannability. Most pillar pages are too dense to skim, and skimming is what readers actually do on a 4,000-word page.
8. Buffer, social media marketing
A category hub that collects Buffer's posts on the topic into one entry point with a short introduction.
What to copy: the low effort of it. This structure is a category page with an introduction, which is the cheapest legitimate pillar you can build on an existing blog.
9. Shopify, ecommerce marketing tactics
A numbered-tactics format, which is a listicle doing a pillar's job. Each tactic is a section with its own depth and internal links out.
What to copy: the format choice. For a topic where readers want options rather than a process, the numbered list is a better pillar structure than a linear guide.
10. Mailchimp, Marketing Glossary
The glossary model. One index page, then a page per term, each capturing its own search demand.
What to copy: the scale economics. A glossary is the easiest pillar to expand indefinitely, because every new term is a new page with clear search intent behind it.
11. Canva, Learn
A large resource library organised by topic and format, sitting on the main domain rather than a blog subdomain.
What to copy: the breadth of formats. Articles, templates and courses under one hub gives many different searches somewhere to land.
12. Webflow University
Structured as a course rather than an article, with lessons, video and a progress path.
What to copy: the commitment to a single format. It does not try to be a blog and a course at once, which is why it works as both a ranking asset and an onboarding tool.
13. Asana, Resources
A resource library covering work and project management, organised by topic with templates threaded through.
What to copy: the templates. Attaching a usable artefact to each topic gives people a reason to bookmark and to link.
14. Hotjar, Conversion Rate Optimization
A guide pillar on a topic adjacent to the product, written for practitioners rather than buyers.
What to copy: the topical adjacency. Hotjar sells session recording and ranks for CRO, which is the broader problem its buyers are trying to solve.
15. Wine Folly, Deep Dive
Included partly as a correction. The Wine 101 page that every roundup recommends is gone, and this is where the equivalent content now lives.
What to copy: the visual identity. Wine Folly's diagrams are the reason its pages get linked, and illustration is the most underused link-earning tactic in this format.
What the live ones have in common
They are maintained. The five that 404 were not worse pages. They were abandoned in a redesign or a content cleanup. A pillar page is a commitment measured in years.
Each subtopic has its own URL. The hubs and chaptered guides both rank better than single monolithic pages, because each child page can target its own query.
Internal links point up and down. The pillar links to the children and the children link back. Doing only one direction is the most common implementation error, and it is what our guide to content gap analysis usually surfaces first.
The commercial ask is light. Almost none of these pages sell hard. They earn links because they are useful, and the links are what make the money pages rank.
They answer the query in the first screen. A pillar targeting "what is agile" says what agile is before it does anything else.
How to build one
Pick a topic you can own, not one you would like to own. If ten established sites have chaptered guides on it, your version needs a genuine angle or it will not be read.
Write the children first, or at least plan them. A pillar with three thin sub-pages is a landing page. Eight to fifteen real sub-pages is where the structure starts working.
Choose a structure and hold it. Guide, hub, library or glossary. Mixing them produces a page that is too long to read and too shallow to be a hub.
Build the internal linking as you publish, not afterwards. Retrofitting links across thirty pages is the job everyone postpones and nobody finishes.
Put a maintenance date in the calendar. Every dead example in this article was once someone's flagship page.
FAQ
What is a pillar page? A page covering a broad topic that links out to more detailed pages on its subtopics, and that those pages link back to. It exists to consolidate topical authority and to rank for the head term.
How long should a pillar page be? Length follows structure. A chaptered guide might be 2,000 words on the pillar itself with 15,000 across the chapters. A hub can be 800 words. Word count targets are the wrong way to plan one.
How many sub-pages does a pillar need? Eight to fifteen is where the structure starts doing real work. Below about five it is a long article with links.
Is a pillar page the same as a content hub? Close enough in practice. A hub usually implies a lighter parent page linking out; a pillar can be a full guide in its own right. Both rely on the same internal linking logic.
Do pillar pages still work in 2026? Yes, and the reason has not changed. Search engines and AI answer engines both reward sites that cover a topic thoroughly and link it coherently.
Should the pillar page be on my blog or main site? Either works. Several examples here sit on the main domain and several on the blog. What matters is that the URL does not move, because a pillar accumulates links for years.
Why did so many famous pillar pages disappear? Site redesigns and content pruning, mostly. Companies delete pages that stopped converting without checking what was linking to them, which is why five of the most-cited examples for this keyword now 404.
Building the cluster underneath
The hard part of a pillar page is not the pillar. It is producing and interlinking the eight to fifteen sub-pages that make the structure work, and then keeping them current.
That is the job Distribb is built for: it plans the topic cluster, writes and publishes the sub-pages into your CMS, and adds the internal links between them as it goes. Three-day free trial, and it is worth reading our content hub examples alongside this page for the cluster side of the same problem. The writing and publishing engine behind that is our AI content writer.