Directory Structure

Does it matter for page rank?

[menyak]

When you add new pages to your site, the Google bar will try and guess the Page Rank by the number of subdirectories/slashes in the URL:

e.g. on a PR6 domain, mydomain.com/page.html will show PR5, mydomain.com/directory/page.html will show PR4, etc. etc.

But is it true that, once a page has been spidered, it doesn't matter if it's in a subdirectory or not? In other words, will mydomain/directory/page.html turn into a PR5 when it's linked to directly from the PR6 main page?

[steveb]

"In other words, will mydomain/directory/page.html turn into a PR5 when it's linked to directly from the PR6 main page?"

Yes. (Normally.)

[bcc1234]

I don't think that directory structure makes any difference once the pages have been spidered and indexed.

[Marcia]

PR is by the page, it's the links.

[brotherhood of LAN]

PR is by the page, it's the links.

And the toolbar guestimates are useless.

"directory structure" in regards to physical locations of files doesn't matter.

[Woz]

>"directory structure" in regards to physical locations of files doesn't matter.

Yes, and No. As Marcia says, PR is a function of Links, hence a page deep in a tree structure can have a higher PR than the home page if it has more and better links to it.

However, as menyak suggests, if Google has little or no information on a page with which to calculate PR, then it guesses until such time as it does have enough information, and these guesses are generally related to internal link structure and/or tree structure.

Onya
Woz