SEO problem if homepage is 2 folders deep?

[MarketingResults]

We are currently looking at a site for a client, where instead of featuring standard file structure, every folder is being buried two folders deep by the CMS.

So the homepage is:

www.domain.com.au/folder/folder

And a subpage is:

www.domain.com.au/folder/folder/subpage

Is this necessarily and SEO problem?  Will it be positive for rankings to pull out the two redundant folders?

Any insights are appreciated!

Cheers

[mediabase]

Hi Marketing Results, As we know that Search Engines measure the importance of a page's subject matter in part, by its proximity to the Homepage. Oftentimes content kept in directories that are more than 3 directories deep are considered of low value and will have difficulty ranking well for their topic.

From the SEO point of view it makes an impact . To see how it creates an impact please refer to this link:

http://searchengineland.com/supercharge-your-urls-for-maximum-seo-impact-14006

[Dr-Pete]

It's not great. I find Google to be very stubborn about wanting to use the root level, and putting it 2 levels deep could cause some general crawl and canonicalization issues. Plus, Google may go looking for a folder or pages at the first level.

You're also adding duplicate keywords to every URL and pushing down the unique keywords. Even though keywords in the URL are a relatively weak ranking factor, it certainly isn't going to help you.

The risks may be small to moderate, but there's no up-side that I can see. Is this primarily a technical issue?

[Dr-Pete]

I should point out that directory "level" in the URL is not the same as how deep a page is. If a page one-off the home-page is 4 directory levels deep, the crawlers still see it as one layer down, because that's how they reached it. I agree that this structure is far less than ideal, but I don't think it would automatically harm your internal PR flow.