Seperate directory for each page in a site.

[serpent star]

Is there any truth to this assertion, or is it a spammy SEO trick?

[when talking about building sites that are search engine freindly]
"Optimally, you should create a new directory for each page and entitle it index.html.
Certain engines such as Lycos and Infoseek will view each index.html as a new directory index and index it in their database accordingly (counting as a brand new site), and add to your homepages ranking by link relevance (the more indexes that link to your home page the better)"

[JamesR]

Well, sounds like really old information....Infoseek doesn't exist anymore and I haven't heard of FAST (Lycos' search provider) giving any such increase. I think that is an old trick that worked about 3 years ago :)

[serpent star]

Thanks for the reply. Will avoid this then.

[buckworks]

Another thought to throw into the mix:

Depending on promotional plans, for some content this one-page-per-directory approach might work well because it can make simpler, more attractive URLs to use in offline promotions and emails -- yoursite.com/whatever compared to yoursite.com/whatever.html.

[pageoneresults]

> Is there any truth to this assertion, or is it a spammy SEO trick?

There is truth if structured properly. You can create a directory for each category and have an index.htm page in each one leading to that category content.

You can also use canonicals although I haven't travelled that path just yet.

There is nothing spammy about having sub directories that are constructed around a specific product or service. As buckworks says, more attractive URLs, shorter too!

Its also a necessary part of site management. Depending on the amount of content you have, will determine your directory structure. I make it a point to create topic specific directories and then place all topic specific files within their appropriate directories.

Sure, people will probably take this approach from a spammy point of view. But you know what, if its not structured properly, linked to and from properly, it won't work.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 1:10 am (utc) on July 18, 2002]

[rcjordan]

>simpler, more attractive URLs to use in offline promotions

I have one large (thousands of pages) site that uses this directory1/directory2/index.html approach and promotes the ease and utility of "learning" the simple, logical url structure and then skipping any search or navigation links when drilling down to the content pages. This makes it popular for repeat visitors; I have been told many times that they check my site first because they can guess the url.

Also, you can switch extensions of an index.html file to index.shtml without disturbing links. (A handy trick I just used today to add some temporary tracking code.)