Directories structures and Google

A lot of folders or less is better? What about changes and google refresh?

[silverbytes]

I've got a hotel's site. Currently working decently with a plain structure.

domain/hotels/hotel

I was thinking in a directories structure like:

domain/country/town/hotel

2 questions:

Will that benefit my PR? I mean having in url specific words as country and location wouldn't be better for search engines and Google?

What happens with links since I will be changing documents, moving directories, creating others... will Google know that. I've seen dead links in google results and that would be bad, all my links dead.
Does spiders detect it daily? Any light about it?

[John_Caius]

There's not much evidence that keywords in folder names makes any difference. What's more important in terms of PR distribution around the site is how many clicks you have to make to get from the homepage to the target page. If I had a site with the index page and one other page linked from it, the PR of the target page would be the same in the following instances:

www.domain.com/target.html

www.domain.com/subdirectory/target.html

www.domain.com/a/b/c/d/e/f/target.html

The Google toolbar might not guess the correct PR though, since it guesses subpage PR based on the number of subdirectories, not how far the page is from the homepage.

[takagi]

Will that benefit my PR?

PageRank is not related to keywords, a page has a PR no matter what keyword was used to get there. Typing the URL, or using a bookmark, will not influence the PR shown for a page. So having a keyword in your directory, will not help or hurt your PR. It could help your ranking (position on the SERP) for the sub pages a little bit if you get deep links with the URL as link text. In most cases that is not likely. Other benefits will be minimal if any. The only exception that I know of, is that the ranking of images (Google Image Search [google.com]) partially depend on the filename.

Changing your directory structure could temporarily even hurt your PR, because the internal linking (e.g. links on sub pages pointing to your home page) is not working correctly as far as Google is concerned until al the new pages are spidered and the new backlinks are calculated.