The number of subdirectories?

[jpod]

I’ve heard that you should try to stick to less than four subdirectories on your site and that the closer to the root the content is the better.

I have a site with up to six subdirectories like this:

www.domain.com/web/info/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4

However the two directories at the top web/info/ are “empty”, that is they contain no pages just the subdirectories and are really not needed. Dir1 through 4 have descriptive names and contain all the pages. Hence the site could be rebuilt to look like this:

www.domain.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/

I guess the situation is a little bit peculiar since the top two directories are empty.
Would you say it’s worth the effort restructuring the site? I’d have to do a lot of 301:ing.

[incrediblehelp]

Would you say it’s worth the effort restructuring the site?

Not if your already ranking well. If you are not, then go right ahead and try what you need to to get to the top.

[redspace]

Ya do not change it if you have already ranking well. but getting not to deep in site structure would be the way to go. spider would takes longer time to crawl our site if it is too deep and the linking part is not good.

[jpod]

Thanks,
Well, you can always rank a little better...
All pages on the site are indexed in Google so indexing isn't the problem. I was just thinking about the loss of ranking because the pages are two levels deeper than necessary.

The site has lots of pages. I'm starting to think that I shouldn't try to fix what isn't broken.

[jpod]

This question was discussed (and answered) on the SEO 101 podcast – 28 February. Thanks. Really info.

[drmadcow]

If the pages are index then I'd just leave them. Remember that internal pages also give link strength to the rest of your site, not just the externals. The number of subdirectories matter not (other then presenting a friendly URL on your SERP result), the number of links, and how many clicks deep you have to go to find a page are what matter :) Cheers.

[winners]

If You Create Many Subdirectories With RSS Feed And Keywords On Ever Subdir And Creat Google Site Map And Blast Those Link To Mass RSS Directories I Think This Can Help

[kbeus21]

As long as your most important conent is close to the top you will be fine to add as many sub directories as you need to keep your site well organized.