Directories how deep?

[tabheaven]

Hi,

I am going to use mod_rewrite to create nice looking urls for a new site. But I have a question on what strategy to use and don't loose to much pr.

First my plan was something like this:
/browse/ to show all letters (A-Z)
/browse/A/ to show e.g. artist on A.
/browse/A/AAA/ to show songs from the artist AAA.
/browse/A/AAA/BBB/ to show the song BBB.

The urls look really nice.

But then I thought about loosing pr for the deep directories. Am I correct that the "directories" will get lower and lower pr, the deeper the directories are?

Would it be better to do something like:
/letter/A
/artist/AAA
/song/BBB

Anyone have any ideas about this?
Probably this has been discussed before but I couldn't find it..

//Mattias

[takagi]

PageRank is not related to directory structure. Only if a PR is shown for a page unknown to Google, you could get a guessed PR that 'depends' on the directory structure. But guessed PR is not relevant. So just use a directory structure that is easy to maintain if your site is getting bigger.

[tabheaven]

So it works like that :)
Sounds pretty obvious when you say it.

/browse/A/AAA/BBB must be better if google look at the url when giving PR.
In that url we got two keywords, AAA and BBB.

Thanks alot!
//Mattias

[shaadi]

But prefer to keep it close to the root - might be helpful for AV, AJ and other SEs

[iThink]

tabheaven,

The decision depends mainly on one factor. Will you be able to get links (I mean, incoming links) to your directory/site only to your home page or will you be able to get links to most of the individual artist pages too?

If you think you can get incoming links pointed only to your index page then go with the second structure keeping each artist page closer to the root so that more PR is passed on from index page to individual artist pages.

If you think that you have time and resourses to get links to most of the individual artist pages then the structure you proposed in first example is better.