4 replies to this topic

[Googlewhacked]

'Lo everyone!

As a part of my (seemingly neverending) SEO education, I am doing a bit of reading and seem to be coming across a little inconsistency regarding the use of subfolders within a site for storing related groups of pages.

Basically, I have heard a few people say that doing this can impare SEO efforts, negatively affect rankings, and generally make one feel like they are trying to "ice skate up hill".

However I have also come across a few articles that say this is ok and that the impact is negligible (if there is any).

What have you (collectively) seen to be the case? I know that individual results may vary, but I would just like a consensus.

Thanks!

- GW

[mcanerin]

My experience has been that it seems to work fine. To be more accurate, the pages I've done like this are in the Top 5 on Google and MSN and I haven't noticed any issues so far.

I guess the only thing I can say for certain is that I've experienced no penalties for it, since there are so many other things that affect your rank.

I remember Sharon and Roy posting some research they had done on this (which is why I tried it) and it seemed to make a difference. I don't remember the link, sorry.

As long as it's not obviously being done in a spammy fashion it should be OK. I found that organising the site this way actually made it a lot easier for me to create Site Maps and think about an effective web structure.

Ian

Edited by mcanerin, 21 August 2003 - 06:55 PM.

[Jill]

The rankings have nothing to do with the physical structure of your site, i.e., whether pages are in subfolders/subdirectories, or not.

It's all in how you link to the inner pages. If you're linking to those subfolder indexes from your main page, they should be counted exactly the same as if you linked to pages in your root folder.

However, if you can't get to a page until you've made say 5 clicks, it really doesn't matter if the page itself is in the root directory or buried into 5 different folders. It's the number of clicks to get to it from the home page that seems to determine it's importance to the search engines.

Hope this helps!

Jill

[mcanerin]

Really Good Point! It would be really easy to get carried away and end up with a 5 directory deep URL that's 200 characters long! Hardly user friendly.

Ian

[Googlewhacked]

My hat goes off to all of you. Thank you very much!

-GW