Which navigation should I choose?

[davewray]

On my site I have an area where I post articles of on topic information. Let's say my site is about widgets and I have several articles about different types of widgets.

Would I be better off doing:
[widgets.com...] OR
[widgets.com...]

Or does it really matter? Which do the SE's prefer, especially Google? (By the way, "bluewidget" would be the name of my article). Thanks in advance!

Dave.

[aek]

I don't think it makes any difference, do what ever is easiest for you.

[g1smd]

I have heard it said that Google PageRank decreases by one for each level of directory/folder structure that you travel away from root.

[Birdman]

It will be easier for you to keep articles in their own folder, so I would go with option 1.

>Google PageRank decreases by one for each level of directory/folder structure that you travel away from root.

I don't think it works that way. If you link to a page that is 4 levels deep directly from your home page, it will not be four points lower.

[hakre]

google pr is per document not per site. so if a document, even 100s directories down in you url can have pr10. the thing described by g1smd is only if there is no pr available for the site and the google bar then calculates down the thing. but true pr is not affected by this.

[Mohamed_E]

> I have heard it said that Google PageRank decreases by one for each level of directory/folder structure that you travel away from root.

Page Rank is based on link structure, not on directory structure. See [www7.scu.edu.au...]

[Mike_O]

A related thought:

You might be better off doing "relative" url linking. If you're in the widgets.com root directory, I believe this is the way it's done:

"./articles/bluewidget.html"

That should take you to [widgets.com...] .

That way if you change your domain name -- or even just want to save your site to a CD in runnable form -- the links will still work as is.

It helps for portability in general.

[Edited to fix goof at 10:04 -- and (sigh) 11:04]
-- Mike

[g1smd]

Thanks for the additional clarification to my half-truth. As an ODP editor I don't follow the Google discussions at all closely.

[JamesR]

You need to think about scalability and organization. If your site is going to grow into many page, a logical subdirectory structure will help both you and your users.

If you have a small site and will keep it that way, through it in the root directory.

I would worry more about usability than the effect on Google. I agree with the comments already that it really doesn't matter.