Directory structure conflict

SEO person says I need to put my pages into folders

[sanpanza]

I have a small photogrpahy website: no ads and maybe 20 pages total. The SEO person I have hired insists that my catagories/pages i.e. "los angeles editorial photographer or los angeles photographer" should be catagorized into folders, but I am ranking fairly well for ALL my search terms, although could be doing a bit better.

My current strategy is to add a lot of great content and delvelope one way links to my site, so my questions is, "Is This Necessary or even recommended to change my directory structure to include folders with categories"? Should I fix it if it ain't broke

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Ed Carreon

[Harry]

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

If you change all your existing links, they'll take time to reappear under the new address on search engines. Moreover, if someone copied your contents, you'll make them the holder of the older stuff, not you.

[sanpanza]

Thanks Harry, what if I do a 301 redirect from the new URL. I am told that puting the different categories into search engines categorize data.

Ed

[willybfriendly]

I don't know that there is much SEO benefit, but, there is certainly an organizational benefit. Five years down the road when your site is hundreds, or even thousands, of pages in size you might like having it broken into more digestable chunks.

WBF

[sanpanza]

Then perhaps when i reach 40 pages or so (currently 18) then I should consider it. Thank you all for your in put.

[andrea99]

An alternative to using directories that is still good organizationally is putting everything at the root and taking great care in naming your files.

In other words, rather than put all of the pages about left-handed widgets in a folder/directory called "left-handed," you could prefix every file name with "lh" and then you can group them all together in the root directory by ordering them alphabetically. This does keep all your URL's at the root.

I'm not aware of any drawbacks to this, provided the system is well thought out at the beginning and used consistently.

I personally like to keep all my files in the root directory this way, just a preference and another way of doing things. I've never had any seo conflicts this way nor have I ever lost my way in my own site--well, not for long. :)

[jfodale]

300 static pages on my site and I do it exactly how you do, andrea.

No problems yet...

[watercrazed]

Hi,

About 700 pages about 200+ in the root directory. The only draw back to andrea's approach (other than more consistant organization then I can alway maintain) is that evenually it can take quite a while to locate a file. I believe there is a small seo advantage to having the files in the root, all my main category pages that I am target at real competitive words are in the root. The advantage is that there is a shorter url, and the files is future up in the web structure (in one sense), some believe that carrys a bit of weight with the ranking algos.

[watercrazed]

Hi,

About 700 pages about 200+ in the root directory. The only draw back to andrea's approach (other than more consistant organization then I can alway maintain) is that evenually it can take quite a while to locate a file. I believe there is a small seo advantage to having the files in the root, all my main category pages that I am target at real competitive words are in the root. The advantage is that there is a shorter url, and the files is future up in the web structure (in one sense), some believe that carrys a bit of weight with the ranking algos.

I believe the disadvantages from an seo standpoint way outweight the advantages of moving existing files, for the reason's given by others and more. The maybe some advantage from a themeing standpoint to structuring them in sub domain like about.com does but you are talking a really large sites.

[andrea99]

The method I described works well *within* directories as well. There's no reason why you couldn't add a directory (or more) after the root became unweildy. Thinking long and hard about your file (and dir) naming system before you begin is always a good idea even if it weren't for the SEO aspect. I have many files I'd like to rename but they "work" so well now with Google that I'm afraid to "fix" them.

From an SEO standpoint I'd keep the files to be indexed at the root and save the directories for images, scripts, etc.