Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question

[ClayPotCreative]

Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc.

My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately.

Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it?

Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!

[MonicaOConnor]

I believe that the preferred method is in the HTAccess file. When we reformatted the URLs on our site this was the most efficient, cleanest way to do it. This kind of Dynamic Redirect protects you from 404 pages and losing your page values. I didn't see any negative effects using this method of restructure. I had about 6000 pages that each had to change URL, it was a nightmare. We migrated to a completely new platform and file server, so we had to change URLs.

I hope that is helpful. I don't see one method benefiting your engines more than the other. I would suggest doing whatever will be the least amount of work, will be the cleanest way to do it and will in the long run keep your URLs clean and without erroneous information.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Search engines can't tell the difference so all good.

[Maayboli]

At a fundamental level, you are keeping the data somewhere and it is rendered correctly. In a CMS this data is stored in a database completely outside search engine view. So it does not matter if it is in database or in physical directory somehow. So there is no benefit in keeping the structure same physically.

Having said that and my own experience (we manage website with millions of pages) managing this using HTACCESS script is NOT a good idea. You will be limited by what you can do and maintaining will be quite challenging.

I strongly suggest consider moving to a CMS (like drupal) and store all you content inside a database and the CMS script takes care of HTACCESS plus gives other goodies. There are several tool available to get your content from disk into a database.