file location for benefit of the inbound links

does it matter? it's confusing

[chrisandsarah]

hello

if most of my inbound links pointed to...
mydomain.com/bath/index.html

yet i wanted to add a hotels file for 'bath'
would it be better off in the same directory like this:
mydomain.com/bath/hotels.html

or a directory like this:
mydomain.com/hotels/bath/

My reason for maybe using the latter directory is that i have many other areas to cover, and if they all linked back to the same directory named with the keyword 'hotels' would this help my ranking for that keyword?

Also, if i got inbound links to mydomain.com/hotels/index.html
would it help my ranking for other files within the hotel directory e.g mydomain.com/hotels/bournemouth/
?

thanks,

[deejay]

PR flows from your linking structure, not from your directory structure.

The beauty of this is that you can physically store your files in directories in whatever way is easiest for you to maintain without affecting PR, and you can very simply direct PR where you want it to go with your linking strategy... so:

would it be better off in the same directory like this:
mydomain.com/bath/hotels.html

or a directory like this:
mydomain.com/hotels/bath/

Makes no difference either way. Your keywords are in the links and presumably in your link text. Theoretically you might be better if you are targetting the phrase 'keyword1 keyword2' to have them in that order in the link, but I think this would be far outweighed by making sure they were used in that order in the link text, rather than just in the URL.

My reason for maybe using the latter directory is that i have many other areas to cover, and if they all linked back to the same directory named with the keyword 'hotels' would this help my ranking for that keyword?

Nope, you won't make any gain just by having these files stored together. You may make a gain by paying attention to how these files are linked to make the most of your PR distribution.

<add> just noticed you said "linked back to the directory". How the files are linked is a separate issue from the directory structure - the result of linking them is the same if they were all in the root directory and the files were named keyword1-keyword2.html rather than /keyword1/keyword2.html. </add>

Also, if i got inbound links to mydomain.com/hotels/index.html
would it help my ranking for other files within the hotel directory e.g mydomain.com/hotels/bournemouth/

Again, no. It all depends on how the files are linked.

If you achieve a PR of say PR5 for /xxx/index.html, that will be of no value to /xxx/file2.html unless there is a link on index.html to file2.html.

That link from index.html is also of exactly the same value to /xxx/file2.html as it would be to /xxx/yyy/zzz/file146.html, or to /aaa/file3.html.

It really is all down to your linking and site navigation structure.

[chrisandsarah]

thanks deejay, i learnt alot from your post. thanks for taking the time.
chris