All pages in root or sub-directories?

does it matter - please weigh in

[5x54u]

Forgive me if this has been beat up. I want to know recently what is working better. Do some of you have multiple sites of which some site's pages are all in root and the other site's pages in sub-directories? If so would you mind sharing your experience with this?

Currently all my sites are all in root. Is there a definitive difference or is mostly opinions?

Thank you

[growingdigital]

My preference is sub-directories. Here is why... It's much easier to remember this URL: [example.com...] then it is to remember: [example.com...]

Plus you can change the page name and extension much easier if it resides in a sub-directory.

[edited by: msgraph at 1:47 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2004]
[edit reason] changed widget to example [/edit]

[5x54u]

Thank you GrowingDigital

Anyone else have definitive results one way or the other?

I am currently testing each one of the theories on two separate domains on two differnt shared hosts.

M

[prairie]

I can't profess to know for a second, but I always use directories because I feel it gives the site a better structure with extra keywords.

Its also too hard to manage large numbers of files if they all sit in the root.

[neuron]

you can put all your pages in the root if it's a small website, 100 or pages or less. Try to imagine 100,000 pages in the root.

One advantage to using directories is that you can use keywords for directory names. Another one is that I run different scripts on different parts of sites and one script may be able to keep from generating pages with identical file names if it's the only one generating files, but if you have several scripts all making pages in the same folder you could cause quite a mess.

I prefer my folder names contain some keyterm I'm optimizing for. So if someone's looking for fat, smelly, deep-fryed widgets, they might find them at www.widgets.com/fat/smelly/deep-fried/

[walrus]

Definitley use subdirectories.
I would say even under 100 pages if you want a decent showing in the Search engines.
Its not necessarily needed to manage as few as 100 but that extra effort would pay off in the engines.

[Cook]

A big pro in favor of subdirectories is the structure it forces on us while building our websites. And I find it makes it way easier to maintain them too. And I can't think of any cons...
Cheers,
Cook

[VegasRook]

I have a question. I have a smaller site and am leaning to using sub-dirs. Which is best?

Key phrase: free widgets

site.com/free-widgets/ (index.htm)

site.com/free-widgets/free-widgets.htm

site.com/free-widgets/free.htm (or widgets.htm) (or another key phrase like free-widgets-daily.htm)

Thanks!

[walrus]

If you go without index in subs you run the risk of 404 errors without a an htaccess command to custom pages or redirect to.I know some use an index with frameset at 100 % and use the widgets.html as main frame.
For me seperating the keys with a hyphen or underscore has been more effective, and I have gone as many as 4 words but only on a couple pages.

[freeflight2]

what about wikipedia (and other wikis) it's all under root site.com/keyword and doing extremely good in google (1B pvs/mo+)

[walrus]

I think the 183,000 inlnks they have is the reason for that.

[EliteWeb]

All my legit sites except if they are directories have the pages in root. If for some reason I have so many on one subject I will move those to a sub-category on the topic and create a unique index page listing all the topics and news for the subcategory.

[walrus]

I cant remember the thread but the other day I saw a post by Brett in an older string that keeping them all in root directories is just fine.