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I have two questions:
1. When completing pages, is it better to submit them them manually, or simply leave them on the server to be picked up by the next crawl?
2. What's the best location for pages? The article suggests "Throwing everything in root" but also says that this technique is controversial. What are the pros and cons of this?
Thanks all
May people have th opinion that it's not the number of directories on the server that matter but how many clicks deep the pages are from the homepage. Most try to keep pages 3 clicks or less from the homepage. The less the better but try to not have more than 100 links/page.
Some people say that for every step down the directory structure you go you lose 1pr. Throwing everything in root would get round this. However, every time someone says this, a senior member seems to step in and say that it's rubbish.
Such discussions usually end with the conclusion that it doesn't matter where your files are kept, that it's your link structure rather than your directory structure that matters. If you can't optimise your directory structure, then you might as well create a structure that's user-friendly for your own sake.
The other factor that you might want to consider is that you can use your directory structure to introduce keywords into your pages' urls. Putting pages in a "blue-widget" directory might help you in the SERPs. The effect of this, though, I gather, is pretty marginal.
Now perhaps someone with more than four posts to their name and some SEO experience could comment :)
Does this mean that I should cut my link page into half, I have about 150 links on the page.
I've always read here to keep it around 50 per page.
Brian
2. What's the best location for pages? The article suggests "Throwing everything in root" but also says that this technique is controversial. What are the pros and cons of this?
Deep crawls happen less frequently than fresh/standard crawls, so it makes sense to make your site less deep if possible. But I don't think it's necessary to put all your files in root. If your link structure is done well, even a regular crawl should go at least 1 level deep.
That said, I'm in the middle of an experiment on my current project. The client has a variety of products and services, and a variety of categories of products.
Normally, I would manage the content like this:
/products/category1/product1/
/products/category1/product2/
/products/category2/product1/
/products/category2/product2/
etc.
The experiment I'm doing is that all products are going in the /products/ directory, no sub-directories beyond that, and I'm using descriptive filenames -- such as /products/bluewidget.html. All of my other SEO techniques will be the same as I normally would. I want to see for myself if there's any truth to the reports that this arrangement is more SE friendly than deeper directories and filenames that don't match the products exactly. We'll see in a few months........
The hyphen will separate your oneword filename into a two-word file name for processing. This is due to the extra difficulties in recognizing and parsing words from character strings..
ie: "bluewidgets", could mean "blu ewidgets", "bleuw id gets" or any combination of characters
"blue-widgets" is parsed as "blue widgets" but keeps the filename intact.
Where is this "Successful Site in 12 Months with Google" article, sounds a very interesting read
