What's a preferred site structure?

On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.

Katy Bairstow from London asked:

There seems to be little impact on human visitors where in the site's structure a given page is, so:
Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g.:
food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• site
• structure

[dross202]

I think she may have been asking about directory structure and where to keep files rather than burying a page through clicks.

[northcave]

Yes I agree with dross202. I think she was asking if it was better to keep certain pages within a directory that relate to each other. Many frameworks allow directories to skip about even though the pages are directly linked. If they we're linked and also shown to stem from the same directory, is this preferable?

[KoolitPnoi]

@MrDaveFelton you're correct. SEO is all about common sense. You have to look at it from a visitor stand point.

[juicevb10]

That doesn't actually answer the question. You can get to, or link to, a page that has an extensive directory structure from the home page, or anywhere. The question really asks if Google uses the directory as a hierarchy to determine the content of the page? I think it would, but perhaps not....

[MrDaveFelton]

Sometimes the search for ranking goes mad and common sense leaves the field I guess.

[Conceptskatemedia]

I like to go as far as 1 folder but nothing too much further.

[clops]

Great tip Matt, it seems a lot of sites fail in this aspect. Definitely something to think about!

[alps07]

Thanks for the informative video Matt, you always make it so simple to understand.

[katybairstow]

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Matt, and thanks joses3es for your input!

This pretty much bears out what I was expecting, at the end of the day user experience and quality content outperform any little boosts you may get from tweaking the site structure in this sense.

Thanks again!