3 / 4 level deep URL's

[iNET_SEO]

Hi folks,

I am hoping someone might give a little clarification on this matter.

We have a large directory site with more than 70,000 pages and one question that keeps cropping up is around our directory structure and I cannot find a definitive answer on this.

Our site structure looks something like this...

www.example.com/search/location/county/pagename.html

As you can see from this, it is 4 levels deep.

I have always gone by the 3-and-under depth for any site I work on but what I need to find out is if having a 4th level actually makes any difference to search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing) or the way the site is crawled?

Any help or reference points on this will be a great help!

Many thanks,

Andy

[tedster]

The directory structure itself is not a ranking issue. With url rewriting, a URL can appear to have as few or as many "directories" as the owner wants.

What matters for crawling, indexing, ranking (all three steps) is the internal linking structure - and that linking architecture does NOT need to mirror the apparent folder structure.

Through internal links, you can easily establish a strong page deep within a directory structure. And if that page holds truly valuable content, then it can attract even more help via external backlinks.

[iNET_SEO]

Thanks for that Tedster - I think that answers my questions :)

[g1smd]

Are there other URLs for the same content page, like

www.example.com/search/value11/value12/pagename.html
www.example.com/search/value21/value22/pagename.html
www.example.com/search/value31/value32/pagename.html

for example?

If there is, this is exactly the situation I was talking about in post #:4097965 in thread [webmasterworld.com...] a few weeks ago .