Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Thus avoiding long names or many directories would be a good action.
IE: www.yoursite.com/widgets.php
should perform better than
www.yoursite.com/offers/widgets.php
My understanding is more documents in website root means better chances than same documents inside subdirectories.
I'd like to hear your experiences and opinions about it please.
Rather than see your post disappear, let me play devil's advocate and say that your theory isn't borne out by any of my websites. Having a keyword in a URL certainly helps if the keyword is nowhere else, but that sort of page really isn't going to rank well unless it's a minority search term.
As regards how much *extra* weight it gives a page with the keyword nicely placed in <title>, <h1> body text and incoming links, well, I think the collected wisdom of many here is that it is but a grain of sand in the Sahara desert.
Right - let's see who else will chip in now!
DerekH
First title characters more weight?
IMO this is true. The first words in your page title (not URL) have more weight than the following ones.
Best wishes
link back will = www.mysite.com as link text
where the new stuff is conserned and www.myurl.com/keyword/keywordsinthepagename.html are conserned .. its hard to say whats going on there <sinicism>
maybe google has got so self obsessed it looks ats its own results and thinks wow those are good arnt they .. they all have keywords in the filnames thus cant be lieing about the content
</sinicism>
IE: www.yoursite.com/widgets.php
should perform better than
www.yoursite.com/offers/widgets.php
Generally, with each step deeper into a directory tree, PR will decrement, so your first example will perform better if all else is equal.
Try drilling down into subcategories at ODP while watching your PR meter for an example.
Say I had:
1) www.yoursite.com/offers/widgets.php
2) www.yoursite.com/offers/moreoffers/widgets.php
...and I reference both these pages on my website's home page. You're saying Google will weigh them differently and assign different PR?
And perhaps these kind of issues won't be relevant anymore, with the intro of services like Google Sitemaps.
...and I reference both these pages on my website's home page. You're saying Google will weigh them differently and assign different PR?
Depends on how many other pages within your site link to the pages in question, unless your example is implying that the only two links to those pages are from your homepage. I agree with you that regarding PR the location doesn't matter so much, but as far as I've always heard your homepage and homepage directory are automatically given more weight. That's why when you get an indented listing one is either typically the page closer to the root or on the same level. I've found that once you get to two subdirectories, the only thing that seems to matter is content and inbound links, and I guess some good cross-linking. A lot of links to a deep page is definitely a thumbs up to Google. Otherwise it's a wash, although I'd have to say once you get past 5 levels or so the spider has less of a chance of even indexing your page.
Generally, with each step deeper into a directory tree, PR will decrement, so your first example will perform better if all else is equal.Try drilling down into subcategories at ODP while watching your PR meter for an example.
That is mainly due to the fact that vastly more people link to a home page than to a sub-page.
I had a situation once where a sub-page actualy had a higher PR than the home page for a while thanks to some very good inbound links to the sub-page which magnified its PR above that which had been built up by the home page.
although I'd have to say once you get past 5 levels or so the spider has less of a chance of even indexing your page.
This brings to mind the "3 click rule" that suggests that good website design means that you can get to any page from any other page in 3 clicks or less.
From experiance I really don't think that the number of sub directories matters (where a page is actually stored) but the number of hops to find the page.
