Website Structure and SEO
Try to keep a relatively flat site structure. It's best to aim for a maximum of three levels from your home page since some search engines limit their search to the top few levels. Google appears to be the exception to this generalization and can spider down one or two additional levels.
Google uses the number and quality of inbound links as an important factor in ranking your web pages. Each page in the link chain to a specific page has a ranking, and they are applied to the next page in the chain. Each page ranking in the chain is weighted according to the number of inbound links, divided by the number of outbound links, and a percentage of this is added to the next page in the chain. (When Google initially developed this weighting factor the percentage applied was 85%. This may have since changed.) This results in a decreasing weight from pages further away from your home page. Therefore, while your home page may rank well, each level away from your home page is adversely impacted by the percentage applied.
The message is simple here for improved search engine rankings - eliminate unnecessary levels in your website structure.
