Internal links per page, and the root directory.

[Perfection]

Two questions...

1) Is there a general idea as to the maximum number of internal links there should be on one page? For example, I have an "Widget Articles" page that is a list of all widget related articles I've written. Each article has a 1-3 line description followed by a "click here to read it" type of link. For the sake of Google (for both indexing and not appearing spammy) at how many links should I start a "Widget Articles Page 2?"

2) My site was originally going to be small, so I figured putting all of the files in the root directory would be perfectly fine. Jump to 5 years later, the site has grown and will be growing even more starting very soon. However, everything (images and pages) is still being put in the root directory, and I'd actually like to keep it that way.

Would there be anything bad about doing this?

Every page of the site is in the format of www.domain.com/page.html. Would having 100's (maybe 1000's eventually) of plain old .html pages in the root directory cause anything negative in any way?

Thanks in advance.

[tedster]

I know of sites that have well over 1,000 pages in the root and they have many pages that are doing extremely well -- that's been the case for at least two years.

The issue of how many internal links to have on one page is a different question. A flat directory structure takes an information architecture that is well thought-out for the sake of the user. The information architecture does not need to echo the directory structure at all ... and when you put lots of pages in the root directory it's extremely important that it doesn't. I'd say a good rule of thumb is keeping total links on any one page to be under 100.

I also like having images in the root instead of a dedicated images directory. For one thing, it helps to reduce the file size. If each page has a number of images that are unique to it, then I might have a directory called /i/ or something short like that.

I almost always put css and js files in the root instead of their own directory. I mean, how many of those little guys does one site need, anyway?