Are (ultra) flat site structures better for SEO?

[DisneyFamily]

Noticed that a high-profile site uses a very flat structure for there content. It essentially places most landing pages right under the root domain folder.

So a more conventional site might use this structure:

• www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/
• www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/
• www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/landing-page-2/landing-page-3/

This site in question - a successful one - would deploy the same content like this:

• www.widgets.com/landing-page-1/
• www.widgets.com/landing-page-2/
• www.widgets.com/landing-page-3/

So when you're clicking deeper into the nav. options the clicks always roll up to the "top level."

Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal.  Why would a site take the plunge and organize content in this way? What was the clincher?

[LeslieVS]

What if your site is a large ecommerce site?  I'm working with someone who just had their site rebuilt and none of their pages fall into a hierarchy category>category options> product.  You go to the category page and then when you go to another, your url extension is completely unique.  Is this going to hurt them in the long run?

Keep I'm already having them change some of the URLs because they are useless extensions that don't match the pages and are no good for SEO that way.

Should they seriously consider restructuring too?

Thanks!

[mattotoole]

I agree with these guys that the link structure is what matters.  Some of my sites have pages 3 levels deep, but direct links from the top of the home page so they get plenty of link juice from that.

A good reason for a flat architecture is simply to have a short, sweet URL that's easy to remember and share.

It might also just be a byproduct of the CMS that they're using, where product or article pages are given top-level URLs, and category pages are just interstitial pages of links.  One advantage of this is being able to re-categorize -- create new category pages and retire ones that aren't paying off -- without having to move/redirect the actual product pages.  I do this a lot, for both article and product sites.

[RyanPurkey]

I haven't seen URL structures as a deal breaker when it comes to ranking, other than when it's full of session IDs, variable strings, and is a massively large URL.  Mostly I consider using folder names for tracking purposes and try to keep them short for the most part.  That way I can plug in a few to analytics and have a pretty good idea of that area of the site's performance.  SEOmoz wrote a great article on this type of analysis at: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ

You could accomplish the same thing with URL naming convention, but a folder would give you a quick way to organize and allow you to use shorter URL names. Back to the SEOmoz example, their folder names are extremely short, and sacrifice keyword targeting for the sake of length.  As EGOL says, links are going to matter more than the word(s) in your folder name.

[EGOL]

Top level pages are given more weight by SEs but conventional directory structures are also beneficial seen as ideal.

I am not so sure about this.  I think that the weight is determined more by the linkage structure rather than the folder structure....

.... but would like to hear from anyone who has done actual testing on this.