File names

[ubiquitous]

I'm in the process of setting up a new site. I have a number of articles, and in order to keep them in the root directory I named them: art_widget.htm, art_widgetblue.htm, etc...

Obviously "art" stands for article and it helps me easily find them in my Frontpage program. I could have placed them in a separate folder called articles (what I wanted to do) but decided to keep them in the root directory to possibly get a better PR for each one. But now I'm wondering if Google or other SEs will see the term "art" repeated in the numerous filenames and mistakingly think the site is really about art, which it's not.

Dave

[Gory]

This is perfectly OK, go on with it. This does not cause any problems from Google or any other search engine.

[pele]

When people do a search for "art" they might appear in the results.

[simon03]

I thought putting files in seperate folders and naming that folder a keyword would bring higher PR. Am I wrong?
Thanks

[steveb]

ubiquitous, your notion about keeping things in the root folder for higher PR is completely false. It makes zero difference if you put them in a directory. None. Zip. Nada.

PR is just about links. Putting something four levels deep and linking to it from your main page will have the exact PR consequence of having it in the root folder and linking from your main page.

simon03, putting these articles in sensibly named folders wouldn't help for PR, but it would help (a bit) for ranking, and user-friendliness.

[SyntheticUpper]

I'm currently re-organising my site into sub-folders, it needs organising a bit better. There's a dilemma about creating dupe pages though. e.g. all-about-widgets.htm currently in the root directory ranks very well in several slow-to-update engines, and is also PFI for 12 months in another. I'm reluctant to delete it, or robots.txt it out altogether. What I *have* done though is robots.txt the old location out for Google only. I'd be grateful for any advice / experience concerning avoiding dupe penalties from the other SEs during this process.

[SyntheticUpper]

O.K. - my previous post was a bit dull, so the lack of a flood of replies wasn't entirely unexpected ;)

But I'm considering simply not worrying about the potential of a few dupe pages in Google. The reason being that the intention isn't to dupe, but merely to do some housekeeping. This would seem to be within the spirit of Googles terms, and I'm sure other sites must face similar problems on much larger scales. Any thoughts?

If not, I'll get my coat :)

[pele]

I just renamed a few pages on my site and the old version is still cached on the search engines. I really don't see how they can penalize you for changing a filename. If they check the old url it brings up the error page so it's not a duplicate.

[tbear]

pele<<I just renamed a few pages on my site....

I think I would have been inclined to create some new pages and just 'side link' the old ones, just for safety's sake. No missing pages or delays that way. IMHO

[pele]

It was only a few pages and everything is easily found from the customized error page. So I wasn't worried too much about them.
Also, they are not pages that other sites have direct links to.
Most of them are already showing up alongside the outdated urls and it's only been a few days since I changed them.

[jazzx]

ubiquitous
[But now I'm wondering if Google or other SEs will see the term "art" repeated in the numerous filenames and mistakingly think the site is really about art, which it's not.]

i believe its not the "repeated us" of the term - its just that you use it.
i made some very good experiences with the widget in filename. as for your "art" term in the filename googlebot will definetely see and give weight to it as a keyword. i had names as widget-01, widget-02 ect. and fell down for certain search terms.
now that i have rewritten the names in different variations i can definetly see pickin' up on keywords.