I have a site with lots of subjects, each of which is kept in a folder under the same domain. My first page is called index, but I have an index in each folder and links within each folder. The site is http://articles-online.info Does it make it more difficult for search engines to find my pages as they are in folders? Would it be better if I put them all in together? Obviously I would have to change all the index.html pages in the folders to the name of the subject. This would mean that for example the page that is http://articles-online.info/acne/index.html would become http://articles-online.info/acne.html (not a valid link at the moment) This would all take time, but would it make it easier for search engines and directories to find the pages? Would there be any advantages or disadvantages?
No, you'll be fine. Giving each folder a logical name based on the keyword content will actually help them in terms of keyword use. I'd actually suggest that domain/acne/acne.html would be the best possible naming structure from an SEO point of view.
As long as you feed spiders the right link, it doesn't matter how many levels of folders you have. Of course, you want to keep your links and folders to a minimum for other reasons. Keywords in the folder names or urls may help a bit, but I won't spend too much time on that. Can't help noticing that your site has the .info extension. That may be something you need be concerned about. I don't remember the last time a .info site popped up at No.1 on Google. I have seen way too many spammy sites with .info. So, I won't be surprised if Google discount sites with that domain exension.
Don't go crazy with the sub-folders. Google won't always index deeper into a site (i.e., site.com/folder/folder2/folder3/article.html) until the site gets more trust/PR.
I'm with mattUK,, just rename the /acne/index.html to a more targeted keywords like /acne/acnecream.html .. it can be more helpful to you...
How do I feed links to spiders? Is co.uk a better extension? info is actually more expensive than co.uk. but my site gives information so I thought it would be a good extension. The problem with com is that so many of the good names are taken.
Build some links to your pages from other websites, the spiders will then crawl all of the links on your site. It depends, are you just targeting UK visitors?
I would like to reach the world. Would you say that the extension is more important that the name? For example if I have a football page would football.net be better or myfootballpages-online.com ? The second one has a com extension but is more difficult to remember and can be easily mistyped. It would also made my e-mail address quite long.
i think acne.html is a better option. if you have urls like/acne/index.html , you must redirect them to acne.html
I am a great believer in using correctly named folders but I always link to them within 1-2 links of my homepages. Unless your site has a high PR, this is the safest method to use (in my humble opinion). BUT don't use sub-folders just for the sake of keyword stuffing your URL. Use them to organise sections of your site.