[jjh08]

I would like to know how many subdirectories should a website contain for SEO purposes. Currently, I don't know much about SEO, but the way I understand it is that if a website has many subdirectories, the search engine would have a difficult time archiving the web pages that are within those subdirectories if the pages are too deep (I hope that made sense). In my case, it is a personal website and right now, I am not concerned about SEO because my website is still in the beginning stages. However, I was thinking about the future when maybe I would want SEO and I was a little concerned if I had too many subdirectories. At the moment, my site has 3 subdirectories and I would like to add only 1 more directory for a total of 4 subdirectories.

Is 3 or 4 directories too deep for SEO purposes? Thanks in advance.

P.S. - The subdirectories are mainly for my own organization purposes. Any visitors to the site would not have to click that many times to get to a page in the subdirectory, maybe 1 or 2 clicks will take them to a web page in a subdirectory.

[Atli]

This is a non-issue. Search engine crawlers have no trouble with sub-directories. They'll simply follow your links wherever they go, and index whatever they find. Whether the URL points to a HTML file in the top-level directory or a dynamically generated URL that appears to be 20 directories deep, it doesn't really matter.

By the way, I moved this topic to the Web Development forum. It's not really HTML or CSS related.

[jjh08]

Atli, on 07 November 2012 - 05:06 PM, said:

This is a non-issue. Search engine crawlers have no trouble with sub-directories. They'll simply follow your links wherever they go, and index whatever they find. Whether the URL points to a HTML file in the top-level directory or a dynamically generated URL that appears to be 20 directories deep, it doesn't really matter.

By the way, I moved this topic to the Web Development forum. It's not really HTML or CSS related.

Thanks for your reply and I apologize for placing this topic in the wrong forum. I understand now, that's a weight off my shoulders. I was doing a tiny bit of research on SEO and I read on one website that said it is a bad idea to have too many sub-directories. I figured the search engine crawlers could still index the pages correctly but I was not sure. I am new to web development in general and am still learning.

At any rate, I appreciate your help. Thanks

[Atli]

No problem

The trick about SEO is that it's constantly changing. The crawlers are getting smarter and smarter practically every day, and the ranking formulas are constantly being tweaked. What improved your rankings last week may well do the opposite today. That's why you should always be careful about taking advice from random bloggers or forum posts. They are often dead wrong, or simply outdated.

The best thing you can do for SEO is writing clean, valid markup, and publishing good content. Even the best SEO tricks in the world won't get bad content high rankings. Not for long, anyways. (Google is very good at figuring out ratings boosting techniques and countering them.)