I got this ideea and i want to share, I was thinking that pagerank is given to pages regardless of seo friendly url or not. Also, suppose I want to change the category structure at a later time. Under the current structure, if I change the name of a parent url, then all urls below this will be different and lose the visible pagerank. But if there is only the id, I can change the structure often, and the pagerank of the category pages will be the same. What do you think about this? Cristian.
Seo friendly urls are more for serps and indexing than anything - having traffic is far more important than the green bar.
EXACTLY We all enjoy getting decent PR, but the bottom line will always be traffic - in other words - SERPs
Not agree with above. For a directory, you shall promote to higher PR. People submit their website to directories not for traffic. Even DMOZ will not give your good traffic. For a directory, PR is the first of all things. For a business website, it's traffic.
Its because of posts like this that PR is always going to be subject to scrutiny. Why do people still chase PR?
Because they are about 3 years behind the rest of us. Yes, if you use SEO friendly URLs you may loose your PR if you change a parent category. This is why you should have a decent business plan set up, and only begin link building (or boosting your PR in your terms) when the directory is developed - ie. category strcuture complete and many links added.
Study, not copy, what others have done and take your time setting up your categories. Sure you might change around and split some of the secondary and tertiary categories but you shouldn't have a need to change parent categories other than to perhaps add new ones now and then. Also keep in mind most directory scripts treat the category name displayed on the screen separately from the url. Meaning if you have a Books category (directory/books/) and you want to call it Old Books instead, you can can make the change so that Old Books is the displayed link and name and keep the URL directory/books/. Hope that makes sense.
Isn't it easy to get indexed? It seems that being indexed is the first step and page rank is what makes inclusion so lucrative? Thanks and take care...