Links seemingly X levels deep w/SE-friendly URLs

Database site with query strings creates appearance of being deep in site.

[Troutnut]

I'm creating a complex database site using search-engine friendly URLs with PHP. Here's the basic format I have right now:

[widgets.com...]

I use htaccess to make Apache interpret the file named "greenwidgets" in the root directory as PHP. That PHP file parses the whole URL to determine that it should load page 3 of the article about greenwidget 15 from the database and display its information.

However, this could be interpreted as being 3 or 4 levels deeper in the site. Will these pages rank lower in search engines as a result?

I could change my script to something like:

[widgets.com...]
or
[widgets.com...]

It would be a whole lot of annoying work to do that, though. Is it worth it?

[FalseDawn]

I would do it, yes - I tend to visualize everything between the "/" as hierarchical levels on a site - having an "id" and "page" levels does not really make sense.

Don't know why you say it would be a lot of work though? Surely it's pretty easy to parse your second example URLs to extract the data that you'd get directly as GET fields or whatever with the first examples?

[Troutnut]

Yeah, making it parse that way would be easy.

It would be a lot of work because right now I have the slashes, and I'd have to go through about 30,000 lines of PHP and change all my urls.

[kaled]

It's a guess, but I think the "deep" urls would probably have a lower visible page rank. However, true page rank would probably be unaffected.

There may be a difference in the way keywords are handled, however, that might be good or bad.

If it were me, I'd work out how to locate all the necessary changes, and then decide. If you can work out a sneaky search spec that will locate every instance that must be changed (with a few false positives, maybe) then what appears a big job may only take half an hour.

Kaled.