Folder depth and SEO
 

In organizing your sites and folders, is there an advantage to having your index page on a higher level...all things being equal.

Example:

would

mydomain.com/analsluts/index.html

be preferable to

mydomain.com/freesites/november2007/anal/sponsorxyz/analsluts/index.html

?

Just wondering if the placement of the index file has any influence on se jiuce...?

I've read once something interesting about this :)

http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/0155.shtml

I'm also wondering what you guys think about all this ?

Interesting about the number of characters..which lead me to believe shorter folder names might have some benefit. "FS" rather than "freesite" for example. If the article is correct, then you could have lots of folders if you were careful and used short names.

I think it would be wiser not to use so many shortnamed folders :) It would be better to use some good keywords like (freeporn, asiansex...)

Rankings can be improved by the use of good keyphrases in a URL!

Thanks for that bit of advice! That's a little detail I had overlooked.

Folder depth doesn't matter as long as your URL doesn't end up too long - and even then its not something I would worry too much over. Instead, many clicks-away-from-home / low internal link pop are things that can create problems for deep pages.

The more clicks a surfer needs to make to get to a page, the less important a search will consider those pages. If you've buried a page, five directory levels into a site, then really, how important is it? That's the basic concept.

And in fact I've heard from more than one resource that Google only digs three levels deep. With all the millions of pages on the Web, search engines just don't have the time, or the space, to crawl and index every page on every site.

But if you worry about this too much, you'll end up with a really messy site structure that may take you ages to navigate through and find things while you're working. If all your freesite pages are in one directory, you may have a hard time trying to find one page dealing with a particular sponsor. I'd concentrate on creating a directory structure that makes sense and works for you, and make those pages on the root level the best they can be. You can always lead surfers and search engines to pages you want if your index page is built correctly and strongly.

Cheers,
Michael

Google has repeatedly stated public that folder depth does not matter. The main determinant of index penetration is PageRank, not folder depth.

But what pagerank factors? I have some sites that went to zero page rank from 4 (it scares me) recently. I know these sites have many reasons to leak pr from the link structure but I still get great search engine listings plus allot of deep crawling.