Files and URL extensions

using the / correctly in site design

[Buckley]

Hi,

Please bare with me here, it will lead somewhere.

I've built my site using a wysiwyg program and when building the site all the pages extension url run straight off the domain regardless of if they are 1 2 or 3 levels down. Like this:

www.widget.com/specific-page.html

So the structure looks a little like this:

www.widget.com/index.html (home page)

Then if i was to link to say a product section it would just be www.widget.com/name of-page.html

Then if i wanted to link to a individual product page it looks like this:

www.widget.com/product name.html

I see a lot of websites and the product page would look like this:

www.widget.com/products/specific-product.html

and then you have stuff like:

www.widget.com/product/sub category/sub category/name of product.html

Is my structure a problem? Does it matter that all my pages are in one file? Will this hurt my page rank? Any other problems that could occur

Any other thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

p.s. I'd like to thank all the people who regularly post here on this board, in particular those that dont just comment but actually provide real answers to real questions and throw around ideas. Anyone can post but you guys and girls are the ones that make the board great.

[Ceo_Seo]

The best file sturcture is to have ONLY your home page index.html in the root directry. The index.html page is look at as the most relevant, we have done case studies over the past 2 years to proove this. Example of a perfect directory structure should look like..
[exmaple.com...] The keyword should be your file name not the page name.... This will get you imediate higher placements.

G-Man

[edited by: agerhart at 1:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] Removed URLs - Please see TOS [/edit]

[kpieper]

Are you saying that for better search engine placement...

[example.com...]

is better than...

[example.com...]

What about...

[example.com...]

or

[example.com...]

or

[example.com...]

[jdMorgan]

A heirarchical structure has two main advantages:
First, it is easier to manage, being naturally divided up by "subject" as relates to your needs.
Second, it allows the keyword-in-pathname as G-man suggests.

Other than that, the search engines do not care how you structure your site. Search engines like Google, which use a page ranking system, may indeed count click-depth of pages from your home page, but they don't care about the file structure of your site. Your server sees filenames and directories, the web sees URLs; as implied by the many threads here on WebmasterWorld about URL redirection and converting dynamic page URLs to static-looking URLs, the relationship between URLs and filenames is not fixed. In fact, there need not be any relationship at all between how your files are structured and how your pages link.

Jim