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Does Google limit the number of files under home directory?

         

net_rambler

9:40 pm on May 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hello!

I have dynamically generated site and make it looking better use mod_rewrite in Apache...

So, all my ~10 000 pages look like all of them in home directory of the site:

site.com/page1.htm
site.com/page2.htm
..................
site.com/page10000.htm

Most of them are indexed by Google.

My question: is it bad structure to have thousands files in one place? Does it somehow compromizes my site from Google's point of view?

And does it affect ranking and position in SERPs?

What do you think about it?

arnarn

12:12 am on May 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




You'll probably do OK at this point (I have competitors of mine who have done this and it seems to have worked for them).

Personally, I wish there would be a penalty, because as content, it's not organized.. just a bunch of pages put into a pile.

Now, if you were to submit all those pages to a shop, like yahoo or to froogle, then that's different (IMHO), because it's treated as data and organized and accessed as such.

Good luck, but I'll applaud when there is a penalty!

net_rambler

1:14 pm on May 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



actually pages that are coming from different sections of the site have prefix at the begiing like this:
/article-1.html
/article-2.html
......

/book-1.html
/book-2.html
............

/downlaoditem-1.html
/downlaoditem-2.html
....

so it looks actually very good and structured, just excluding directories structure...

From my point of view, since web is about links, not about file storage on hard disk, it should not be big issue how webpages are stored or grouped in URL ...

Most important that every URL has meaningfull name, not like those dynamically generated strange numbers in URLs that give no clue what is page about if you store it in bookmarks and forget to provide good description...

I asked this question because was not sure that Google shares my opinion on it :-)

I do not see logical reasons to ban sites like mine, but was not sure that will not happen...

xalex

5:14 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



It might be potential problem in the future. When you have thousands of pages and redisgn the website in the future, you might have trouble. The SE aready can tell the difference from static and dynamic pages with static URL. And thats not even considering manual check up. The standard changes all the time.

StuffOfInterest

7:29 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



This certainly hasn't hurt Wikipedia. With their URL rewriting it looks like a few million pages in one directory. From everything I've read it looks like the length of the URL doesn't matter that much as long as there isn't too much query string data (after the question mark). It is the crawl depth from the home page which really matters. Too many degrees of separation from the home page reduces value.

Patrick Taylor

7:38 pm on May 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



... as content, it's not organized.. just a bunch of pages put into a pile.

I don't agree. It's organised by the site navigation, not the folder structure. I can't think of any logical reason why Google would 'penalise' this practice (whatever 'penalise' might mean).