Hello Dougy. What I normally do in an instance like this is start separating the articles by subject. So now I have this...

www.example.com/articles/

The above page is an index page leading into all the article sub-categories. From there we go to...

www.example.com/articles/cat1/
www.example.com/articles/cat2/
www.example.com/articles/cat3/

My cat1, cat2, and cat3 sub-directories contain the articles specific to that category. The index page for each of the sub-categories is more of a "table of contents" for that sub.

So you have /articles/ which is the primary table of contents. Then /articles/sub1/ which is the secondary table of contents and so on.

Just be sure to plan for future growth. You may end up growing horizontally by a few sub directories. ;)

Hi

Thanks for the reply. The problem with your method is that you have to create more sub pages which in turn - take longer to be picked up by search engines.
Is there a way of doing something on just the one page (such as drop down menus) that will also pick up the links?

How about sectioning them off on the one page itself with sub-headings, even if the page will be long, and using anchored links at the top so people can easily get right to the section they want. And then, maybe some links to the page "top" interspersed for easy navigating around the page.

I agree with hesitating about making sub-pages, too many pages are getting hit for looking like directories by their file structure.

The problem with your method is that you have to create more sub pages which in turn - take longer to be picked up by search engines.

This is all relative to the internal linking structure of those pages. You can put a page 10 levels deep in your structure and if it is linked to directly from a high PR page, it performs just as well as if it were at level 1. Don't be afraid to logically structure your site.

I agree with hesitating about making sub-pages, too many pages are getting hit for looking like directories by their file structure.

Please explain. I've not seen any issues whatsoever when logically structuring a site using sub-directories. Been doing it for years and will continue to do it for years to come unless something drastic changes. It's a natural progression when sites become larger.

The problem with your method is that you have to create more sub pages which in turn - take longer to be picked up by search engines.

All other things being equal, I'm not not sure there's really much difference. Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that articles.htm is PR5 in either case, and that you have no deep links to your articles.

Looking at it very roughly... if you have 50 articles, you can link to all of them from articles.htm, splitting your PR 50 ways; or you can link to, say, 5 category pages and then link to 10 articles from each category page.

In the latter case, you're splitting your PR 55 ways, more or less... 50 articles plus 5 category pages. The category pages provide optimizing opportunities in themselves, as well as additional inbound link opportunities. Note that I'm disregarding other nav on your pages in this very rough example.

This simple-minded hierarchy may not be an ideal structure, of course. You could pay attention as well to what you're targeting, what's most important to your users, and what's competitive and what's easy to rank on.

pageoneresults is absolutely correct that depth of directory structure doesn't necessarily have anything to do with linking structure. To get a good lesson in the distribution of PR, study the structure of dmoz.

Also, this thread on using a pyramid structure might provide some food for thought...

Search Engine Theme Pyramids and Google
Optimising the Pyramid for PageRank
[webmasterworld.com...]

Is there a way of doing something on just the one page (such as drop down menus) that will also pick up the links?

Assuming your drop-down menus can be spidered, they provide no advantage except a smaller visual footprint... and in my mind, they have lots of disadvantages. Lots of sites unknowingly split their PR a million ways because of global drop-down nav.

If you don't have enough PageRank to support a large number of articles and sub-pages, start with a smaller number of sub-pages and build them up gradually. You don't want a lot of empty or nearly empty sub-pages, which may be what Marcia was referring to with directories, where their empty templates are getting kicked out as dupes.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:12 am (utc) on July 22, 2006]