tedster - 11:03 am on Dec 2, 2001 (gmt 0)

4) If I create sub-directories, am I hurting my page ranking? I thought pages were supposed to be close to root (maybe this is just old SEO info in my part).

Lots of people say this, but IMO it's a red herring that comes from wrong assumptions in studying Google data. On most sites, the farther pages are from the root, the fewer links they have coming from elsewhere on the site. That's what hurts the PR — fewer internal links, not the page's "distance" from the root.

When studying data, a strong relationship between two characteristics (such as lower Page Rank and a page's depth in the directory structure) does not necessarily indicate that a "cause and effect" has been uncovered. In this case, if you read the original PR paper, you will see that the mathematical model that PR is based on supports what I just said. The PR math has nothing to do with directory structures whatsoever.

So I'd say definitely create those subdirectories, but also create those "solar system" linking structures. I've seen pages several levels deep get a higher PR than the site's main index! It's rare, but strong internal linking can make it happen.