Question about directory levels and Google indexing

[ichthyous]

I know that Google was having issues indexing pages more than a couple of directory levels down on sites with low PR values. My site has a PR of 4. The app I am using for my new site has a URL rewrite module that forces you to add another directory level if you also want custom 404 error pages. For example:

no 404 pages: mysite.com/categoryX
with 404 pages: mysite.com/v/categoryX

"v" is the default, but you can change the "v" to any word you want as long as it doesnt coflict with the directory structure. The actual content in categoryX in both these instances remains only one level down from the home page though. So my question is, does it really matter how many levels are present in the URL if the content is still accesible only one level down from the home page? Or will Google see the content as being two levels down?

[tedster]

In my experience it is the click depth that matters, not the directory structure.

[ichthyous]

that's what I figured, since the content is still physically located only one to two clicks away. Does the length of the URL start to come into play though?

[tedster]

Not for ranking purposes, as far as I can see -- for attracting the user's click, I suspect that long urls are a bit of a small deterrent.

[ichthyous]

Ok while I have your attention...do you think it's getting a bit long here?:

http://www.example.com/photos/new-york/skylines/midtown-manhattan-pano-day.html

I am trying to describe the subject in the page name, but it's looking a bit like overkill. Problem is there are too many images that look similar, so I am forced to use longer unique page names. Site isn't live yet so i still have time to revert to something shorter and maybe add a -001, -002 instead

[edited by: tedster at 7:38 pm (utc) on Sep. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Maybe that does tend just a bit toward overkill, but so do some of those default blog and CMS urls, where an entire headline gets automatically hyphenated to create the file name. And certainly some large, dynamic sites have urls that go far beyond your example -- hundreds and hundreds of characters.

Are those urls giving you problems in indexing or ranking? I do usually try for shorter urls than that, but I'd be surprised if this was creating any issue for you on Google. Does each part of that url have a parallel, like both "/new-york/" and "/san-francisco/" are both on the site, and "/skylines/" plus "/street-level/", etc?

[Murdoch]

Good question to ask yourself is when you search for your targeted keywords what's the longest URL you see plus the frequency of a URL that long in the search results?

[ichthyous]

I'm not sure I quite understand your question tedster...but I think the URLS will be fine. I was wondering one other thing though...I have set up my directories to read:

example.com/photos/location

Whereas the link text pointing to those locations use the word "photography" rather than photos, i.e.

link text: Washington DC Photography
link url: example.com/photos/washington-dc

would I get more "bang" if I just used the word photos rather than photography, since it would be reinforced in both the text and the actual url? Thanks