Structure of directories with html files

[wolfadeus]

This might be a bit off-topic for this forum, but I think it is related to the field: About a year ago, I remember a longer debate on whether one could dump all content-files in one directory or - matching with the main navigation - into sub-folders. This was debated primarily in the light of usability (for the webmaster), but most posters were concerned about a possible risk of an effect the arrangement of the content would have on google.

Now my second "big" website just turned 22 (months) and is now fully indexed by google. All of its 900+ articles are contained in a single directory; this is different to my older project, in which I had one subdirectory for every main point of the navigation. With this first website it also took almost precisely 22 months until all contents were properly indexed and started to rank well. As far as I can tell, google treats both websites in a very similar way.

[ergophobe]

That makes sense. Within reason, I don't think the number of slashes in the URL should make any particular difference. Google has no way of knowing how your URL structure relates to your filesystem anyway.

More likely to affect the crawl are things like

- navigation structure - how many clicks to get from the home page to all other pages and how easy is it to grab those links>

- duplicate content - does the crawler need to make six requests and get 301s and such to figure out which is the one canonical URL? If it has to do that for every page, then it will only index 1/5 as many pages as it might in a crawl session.

- server response time - is the server timing out before the crawler gets the page it needs?

I would expect factors like that to have a much bigger impact than where files are located on the hard drive.

[wolfadeus]

Well, some people have argued that with subfolders, you can add more keywords. For example:

www.widgets.tld/keyword1/keyword2.htm

as opposed to:

www.widgets.tld/keyword1.htm

But from what I see, this makes no difference.

[ergophobe]

Sorry, my head is all stuffed up with a cold. I was looking initially at the "properly indexed" part of your first post and didn't notice your comments about the pages ranking well.

I should have said that my feeling is that having more precise keywords in the URL should affect the relevance and possibly the ranking on some longer tail searches, but it shouldn't really affect indexing and crawlability.

With respect to the ranking on more common terms, I don't know. I do think the URL can have some excellent value, but of course in the context of other on page factors. Where I've gotten the most value out of a keyword-rich URL is on content-light pages (i.e. a page that is mostly a single image or something like that).