articles internal folder or not

I have a website that stores all the articles in a path such as:

http://web-address.com/articles/article-name-here.html

Is this ok or should I adopt this scheme:

http://web-address.com/article-name-here.html

Please note that I want to avoid problems with special characters so I am using the articles folders. Anyway, please let me know about the differences between the two ways of storing articles that are supposed to attract SERP traffic on the long run.

Thank you!

 

This doesn't look like a valid answer. Any other ideas ?

 

It really depends on the time it would take you to implement and what your website does. If you are primary an article driven website, then it wouldn't hurt to go with the second implementation. Your current implementation works, and the search engine benefit would likely be negligible. The closer to the root the better, but going 1 directory deep shouldn't be that much of a damper that you have to invest a lot of time and/or money into that.

 

Thank you very much for your answer. I was thinking the same way. I will keep the first structure for now.

 

Yes i remember reading that the less hyphens there are the better

 

The question was not related to hyphens