Less deep pages higher importance in google?

[helenp]

Hi,
I have 6 indexpages like this
example.com/index.htm
example.com/sales/index.htm
example.com/otherlanguage/index.htm
example.com/otherlanguage/sales/index.htm
and 2 more like the last 2.

This structure I did for more than 10 ago.
I am going to redesign the page for bigger and smaller devices, so I am seriously thinking about rediret the sales/index.htm pages to the level before that is about rentals. i.e merge them together, I think the user would have a better experience not having to jump between 2 index pages.
However I wonder if the pages would benefit beeing less deeper pages, or if the contrary, its good to have deep pages.
Thanks

[goodroi]

IMHO directory level is not a main ranking factor so I would not rework old content. If you start moving around old content, you can introduce new issues that can cause ranking problems.

When I build new content, I prefer short and clean urls. I don't do this to make Google happy. I do this so my users can more easily remember urls. This helps to increase direct traffic and boosts url mentions on social sites which also drives traffic. Plus simpler urls are easier for webmasters to type into their code, making it easier for people to link to me.

[ZydoSEO]

My experience is that it is much easier to get 2 separate pages to each rank for a different keyword phrase (e.g. one for sales and second for rentals) than it is to get one page to rank for two phrases (sales and rentals).

As goodroi pointed out, it's not your folder structure that determines how deep an inner page is within the site. It's your navigational and other internal linking structures.

Personally, I think that in most cases... having separate pages for "<widget> sales" and "<widget> rentals" is a much better user experience. The information a users is looking for regarding "<widget> sales" is typically different than the information that they are seeking regarding "<widget> rentals". No reason your navigation can't have a link to both the sales and rental pages even though they are on different levels in your directory structure.

As an added SEO benefit, the content of each page can be more focused on one topic (either sales or rentals) and you get a whole set of on-page elements (title, meta descriptions, h1, h2s, etc.) that you can dedicate to EITHER sales or rentals rather than having to use a single set of on-page elements for a single page to target BOTH sales and rentals. It's been my experience that the latter is much less effective from an SEO perspective.

[lucy24]

:: tangential observation ::

As long as you're redesigning, make sure that the words "index.html" never appear anywhere. Sure, they can be the names of physical files. But your visitors-- both humans and search engines-- should never see anything but /sales/ or /language/

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have a 300 page site that has an html sitemap for visitors(not xml for bots) but no navigation, you can reach every page in two clicks by going to the sitemap. This same site had a full navigation with paginated categories including one that went 11 pages deep.

I expected some change in rank/traffic when I made the change but there was none. This was over a year ago and the site is fully re-crawled many times over... nada.

[helenp]

Thanks all,
the fact is that the sell pages rank lower than the rental pages.
I do now so as I have in same place a rental and a sales property, so if I search for city place villa for exampel, I get in the result the rental page only.
Thought was due to deep pages.
Maybe could be due to the age of the pages, or just the optimization.
The fact is I think the navigation would be better as there are thing in menu that are equal wich I told googlebot to ignore, and other things that are different.
Also I want the persons interested in renting really see we do sell also.

Maybe I could just keep the indexpages and the level and have in the searcher both search for rental and for sales even though sales is in a different folder.

Suppose it changed, but before when one checked the pr-bar in google I noticied the lower level the page was on the lower the pr, however pr has ever imported much.