Organizing 600 articles

...for optimal spidering....

[Hard_Target]

Hello,
I have about 600 keyword-rich articles (sizes anywhere between 2k and 30K) which I will be adding to my site.
I would like to organize them for optimal google spidering.
I have a link from my home page to "Articles" page.
It seems that my original idea for "Articles" (a big 6 x 100 table with descriptive links to articles) is no good (loading time + apparently google is not going to spider more than 100 links per page). Should my "articles" page have 6 links to the pages each containing links to 100 articles? Or should "articles" be my first 100 link page, which then links to the second one .. etc. Or some other structure? I guess what I am really asking is the "breath" vs. "depth" - any guidelines will be much appreciated.

Another question related to this - due to the nature of the articles, many of the links' descriptive text will contain same keywords - this (or these) index page(s) do not have much contents except for anchor text and then the actual links. From the human visitor perspective this will look OK, however I am afraid that google might see this as keyword stuffing (density much higher than in normal text). Is that going to be a problem?

[tedster]

In cases like this, I build a structure that is best for human users - and if I do that right, it will work well for spiders too, as long as I keep good navigational elements on all the pages.

Sites like this need to be categorized and labelled in some intuitive way. You might want to read this thread: [webmasterworld.com...] for ideas about Information Architecture.

[lambo]

As an aside due to the fact that the discussion you pointed to is locked. I just wanted to comment that your 7 item theory relates to working memory.

Research shows that our working memory can only hold around seven pieces of information at a time.

I tend to agree with the 5-10 different channels of information, not due as much with the working memory theory but related more to experience.

I think tedster's discussion is excellent.

I wonder if you could split your articles up into seven 'themed' groups (I also think less than 100 links to a page is better), and then use these separate themes as extra punch for your optimization strategy?

[tedster]

The key with your organization will be selecting the best LABELS for each division. Yes, I would definitely do keyword research in choosing the categories, but also do the card sort that is described in the linked thread above.

And apparently you do have an emphasis on a certain set of words that may be repeated over and over. Anything you can do to bring in variation and discriminate one from the other would benefit both your users and the search engine listings. You can overdo it. Just look at each page to see if the same word is repeated to frequently - especially in link text where perceived "keyword stuffing" can bring swift retribution.

If you keep your human users in mind, I think you will put enough word variation in your link text to steer clear of keyword stuffing problems.