Physical Folders

Physical Folders and Seach Engine Rank

[cliffhanger]

Hi,

I have a lot of pages on my website, which are not actually located in any physical folder. Does this affect my search engine ranking in any way? Does the Google crawler recognize the difference between physical and virtual folders?

[jdMorgan]

Search engines don't recognize folders at all. They recognize URLs.

URLs have meaning only on the Web, and folders and files have meaning only within the server file system. A server's main job is to translate URLs used on the Web into filepaths, so that it can retrieve (or generate) the content for the requested URL.

As mod_rewrite on Apache or ISAPI rewrite on IIS make clear, there is no fixed relationship between a URL and a server filepath.

Unless your server is mis-configured, no user-agent on the Web is ever aware of the file structure on your server's disk.

Jim

[ergophobe]

That said, a hierarchical URL structure does give a SE more info to go on (to a point).

Most of the sites I've done have only one file that ever gets directly requested anyway, but the URL structure is, to the extent of my abilities, logically organized.