URL Structure (Adding sub folders)

[fatoftheland]

Does anyone know how to change the URL structure with Actinic sites? For example i'd like to be able trial moving pages to sub folders to show to the spiders different levels of page importance.

Effectively making top level pages within the actinic folder and then other sections within folders.

E.G: Section on widgets would be:

website.com/acatalog/widgets/widgets.html

Section on red widgets would be
website.com/acatalog/widgets/red/red-widgets.html

The reason behind this is it will allow me to categorise our urls and includes more keywords but also show levels of importance for different pages.

Any ideas how easy this is? Can I simply create folders in the site1 folder and move pages? Or does this need to be done somehow within Actinic?

[fleetwood]

You create the URL structure by arranging your sections within the Actinic directory tree.
Creating a subsection red widgets, below a section widgets, automatically creates the URL \widgets\red widgets once uploaded.
All the physical files are uploaded to one single folder when uploaded (this is how is should be, and you can't control this), and Actinic creates the relevant site map that the spiders will crawl.
Page importance is governed by postioning within the site map - the nearest to home (the top of the tree), being the most important. You don't have to physically position your files within the directory you upload to, to signify this importance.

[wjcampbe]

Cannot be done at all except in your content tree and thus the site map.

If it's in Actinic - it's in the acatalog folder - period.

Search engines tend to measure importance by the amount of maintenance the page receives, he number of visitors to that page, and the number of incoming links direct to that page. If you never change it, and it has no links - it's not important. If you change it weekly and it has a few links - it's more important. If it changes daily and has hundreds of incoming links - that's an important page - to your visitors, and to search engines - though maybe not to you.

[Duncan Rounding]

I think 'levels of importance' as you put it are not based on how deep in the site structure pages are but how deeply linked from other pages they are. With Actinic, as Martin says, you don't have the option anyway.
Perhaps Malcom (Ruralweb) or some SE specialist could comment on this when they're around again....

Edit: Pipped at the post by Bill - whose reply is more comprehensive.

[jont]

includes more keywords

A page on the website is from a section or subsection inside of Actinic so you would only still be able to have the same control of keywords (either META or on the page) as you have at the moment even if you could magically send to different sub-folders on the server.

You may wish to consider creating new / different sections to add in different content, keywords, page-names etc to help boost SEO - with the usual caveat of spamming duplicate content

[jont]

Page importance is governed by postioning within the site map - the nearest to home (the top of the tree), being the most important.

Martin - are you saying Section A is more important that Section Z (listing alphabetically) or do you mean /SectionZ.html is better than /sub/sub/sub/SectionA.html in respect of the subfolders?

[fleetwood]

Hiya Jont

If section A and section z both branch from home, I'm saying they are equal.

What I mean't was (using my basic knowledge and not pretending to be anything other than a novice ), that in the example below, section A, would be deemed to be more important than section z, by a spider:

Home/section a

Home/section b/section c/section z

All roads lead to home - only specific roads lead deeper into a site

ergo, home will always have the most internal links leading to it, and the nearer home your section is, the more important I would have thought it would be seen to be.

Happy to be corrected, as working on logic here, rather than text book SEO.

[jont]

Thats the premise I work towards on non Actinic sites ... just thought I had better check in case there was something new I was missing... which by this time tomorrow there most likely will be

[wjcampbe]

Martin et al, (that's Latin I think )

While page/section depth may well have an influence - I would expect it to be counterbalanced by the update frequency/number of incoming links that the deeper pages have.

I know that using the Google Webmaster tools, its an intermediate section page that is seen as most popular and highest PR on the Egyptianwonders site. And that, I think, is how it should be. My most important page(s) is/are the ones that lead to sales.

[fleetwood]

I agree Bill - SEO is a complexity of factors.

The relevance of tree structure was merely a response to the initial question regarding folder structure.

I'd also say that just as you are indicating, beyond getting the basics right, an hour spent adding and refreshing content is far better spent than another hour of fine tuning SEO, as like you say, new and relevant content naturally aids SEO.

[fatoftheland]

So what we are saying here is that I cannot put html pages generated by Actinic into any form of sub folder?

With regard to some of the other interesting posts, it's interesting to see your views on relevancy/importance for SEO.

Pages which have a deep link structure are indeed viewed as less important. Spiders also class sub folders as a form of this. So the deeper within a folder a page is the less relevant it is. E.G /folder1/index.html is considered more important than /folder1/folder2/folder3/index.html

The reason I asked the initial question is due to some very high ranking pages I've seen on Google which use the method I am referring to. It also a way to include more keywords in the url without have to have long descriptive file names.

The following page works fine:

http://www.wholesaleheating.co.uk/ac...-Sundries.html

Click the testing link

Notice the url acatalog/TESTING/TESTING.html

Add to cart works fine
I simply created the folder, added the navigation images and both of our CSS files to the folder and bobs your uncle it works!

Granted I had to do this by hand using FTP but there is nothing stopping me doing this to other pages. If I made the links to the navigation absolute then there would be no need to add the additional files to the folder.

[RuralWeb]

The reason behind this is it will allow me to categorise our urls and includes more keywords but also show levels of importance for different pages

There is no such thing as level of importance by page depth- as Bill says google determines the importance of a page from many other different factors. The deeper the page the less likely it is to be indexed in the first place so no on page SEO will work.

The method of adding keywords by increasing the length of the file name is known by Google and files names that are too long or have too many keywords will be penalised - simple SEO tricks like this are well known.

[fleetwood]

There is no such thing as level of importance by page depth ... The deeper the page the less likely it is to be indexed in the first place so no on page SEO will work.

Whilst I fully respect Malcolms and Bills views (Malcolm does this for a living, and Bill just seems to know everything ), and its possibly just a question of semantics, the fact that a deep page is less likley to be indexed than one nearer the root, means that there is 'some' level of importance attached to page depth.

This might not be an 'official line' in terms of importance equalling high ranking - but is a logical one.

Its this sort of logic I use to structure my own site - never paid for any SEO - never paid for any PPC's, yet we still achieve top or near top rankings on many keywords. It may not be science, but it works for me.

[fatoftheland]

Exactly fleetwood. This is what I am getting at,,,,


Here is a prime example of the kind of thing I am talking about:

http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/blog/.../330_0_1_0_C1/

As I explained subfolders can improve ranking and help to catergorise a site. Importance is the wrong way to describe what I am referring too. We are talking about levels of relevancy. Top level sections which are not in sub folders are most broadly relevant. Sections within several subfolders are more specifically relevant. For instance:

You have three main departments. Widgets, Gadgets and Gizmos

The homepage navigation links to all these pages in the same folder, say the acatalog folder so:

acatalog/widgets.html, acatalog/gadgets.html, acatalog/gizmos.html

These pages are all on the same level.

This shows that overall the site includes info on these three things.

However acatalog/gizmos/electronic/purple/gizmos.html is a much deeper page and not of the same level of relevancy or importance. It only shows info on a specific type of gizmo.

I am referring to importance as in the relationship to other pages on your site, not importance judged by back links.

Therefore using subfolders allows you to show relevancy in relation to content. This also means that you can bring important content to the top level folder, effectively making it appear more important than the specific content found deep within a subfolder.

This is similar to deep linking mentioned above but not exactly the same as many pages are linked to in numerous ways.



I think this thread is a little unclear... Wish i'd never asked the question!!

[fleetwood]

As far as I am aware Jon, spiders crawl a site by following links, not by working through a folder, one file at a time.

In that respect, I'm not sure I see any relevance to having a structure of sub folders, rather than one overall public folder at the server end.

The fact that a deep link is less likley to be indexed than a top level one, is down to the restrictions placed on the spider - presumably to keep indexing more manageable (the deeper you go, the more pages need to be indexed, and even google must have limits on what it can or wants to cope with).

The point I was trying to make (badly it would seem), is that the way the Actinic tree is laid out determines the final link depth, not the folder a file is uploaded to, and that links nearest home are more 'important' (the word causing the upset methinks), because they are the ones that are most likely to get indexed. How highly they are ranked is of course down to content and SEO, as has been pointed out by Malcolm and Bill.

As far as wishing you'd never asked the question - don't worry - I feel like that every time I open my mouth, but it dosen't stop me!