Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?

[DeltonChilds]

I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/.  It's an attorney website.

All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url.  I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing?

It's set up like this:

www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl

/law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.

[RyanKent]

I do not see any violation of Google or Bing guidelines with that URL setup. I would not necessarily recommend doing it, but if your client did it would not be a violation as stated.

Based on your question, it seems the site is penalized. There is a lot more details required to diagnose the penalty. Some initial ideas can be generated from a few basic questions:

• on what date was the site penalized?

• how was the site penalized? Was the entire site removed from the index? Or certain pages / keywords?

• was there any notice received in WMT?

• are there any known violations of the guidelines? poor content? manipulative links? other issues?