Files organization: root files vs folders structure?

General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m a bit confused about the best practice for organizing HTML files in a Pinegrow project. Should we use descriptive filenames like about.html, services.html directly in the root folder, or should we create separate folders with index.html files inside (like /about/index.html, /services/index.html)? I’ve seen different approaches and would love to hear from experienced Pinegrow users about what they recommend and why.

Thanks for your help.

2

In my experience, the two methods give slightly different results in Google.
Placing different categories in within separate folders often provides a dominant list: primary page followed immediately by the index files in the various directories (folders)
Search for “Transport for London” to see an example.
On the other hand, category files in the root directory would have a priority of one, and would produce better results in a search for that specific subject. Say, your site was about animals, and you placed all the categories in the root (cat.html, dog.html) they could be priority one. Searching for cat or dog would rank those pages higher.
I guess, it’s a balance really of whether the site or the categories are the more important.

3

Hi @mxs
Thank you very much for your answer. I had not considered my question from this angle and it is extremely interesting to take it into consideration.
I was thinking more naively about the possible difficulties generated occasionally depending on the browsers such as for example errors of returning to the previous page in case of too many directories with only index.html (or php) as the only target.

4

Browsers have a cache that remembers the structure of your website.
Do a little research on Rewrite in your .htaccess file.
Simple change would produce https://yoursite.com/cat/ or https://yoursite.com/dog/
Also, get a free copy of ChatGPT - you can ask it how to construct any kind of code for you or ask it the best solution.

5

I know about the cache :+1:
I think I didn’t express myself well. What I wanted to know is if the type of errors I mentioned are frequent or not depending on the chosen tree structure.
I have a lot of AI tools that I use regularly but they don’t give me direct testimonies of situations experienced. Moreover Chatgpt helps me enormously for many things but concerning the optimization of an htaccess it is far from succeeding, eagerly awaiting the next iteration correcting this :grin: