Structuring a large content website

Making it bot & human friendly!

[hdpt00]

What is the best structure to have to make my pages gbot friendly if the site is really large and in a lot of niches.

Here is what I have:

widgets 1
-red widget 1s
--articles on red widget 1s
-blue widget 1s
--articles on blue widget 1s

widgets 2
-red widget 2s
--articles on red widget 2s
-blue widget 2s
--articles on blue widget 2s

etc. etc. where widgets 1 and widget 2 are not related, blue and red inside of their widgets category are related.

Now would it be best to do

widgets1.domain.com/red/article.php
domain.com/widgets1/red/article.php

I am leaning towards the former because widgets 1 and 2 are not related at all (sometimes they are a little related, but sometimes is 180 degrees difference).

If anyone has any advice on what method will bring in the best rankings in the long run it would be very helpful. I know sites like about.com and howstuffworks.com use the widgets1.domain.com style.

Thanks for the advice!

[mbatta]

I am not answering but rather elaborating on your question for I have a very similar issue. (I accidentally posted the Q on the g-news board). It has to do w/ structure and depth. I am currently setup like this:

root/
index.htm
somefunctional_info_page.htm
sitemap.htm

root/content/subject1/
article1-1
article1-2
root/content/subject2/
article2-1
article2-2
root/content/subject2/sub-subject2
article2-3

...you get the point. Anyway, The only pages listed in search engines are the pages in the root. My subject1 and subject2 are unrelated. My index showed up in most engines about 2-3 months ago. Is it the depth of the structure that might be stopping the bots from going deeper?

[hdpt00]

What PR do you have, how often does gbot, slurp and msnbot come by and pick up the /root pages?

[mbatta]

gbot hasnt been by since 11/10 (and the only site im not listed and hence no pr) The others seem to come by about weekly or so. My site has only been live about 4 months and has about 200 pages pure content w/ about 50 added per month.

[hfwd]

I think you're on track mbatta. It now takes at least 6 mo. to get G to deep crawl, unless you have lots of inbound links to the articles.

I haven't seen any clear evidence that either of the two structures delineated above have much effect on rankings.