I've read a bunch of the posts here but have seen a lot of conflicting info when it comes to naming schemes, so I'm wondering... Is it better to name a directory/filename as: directoryname/index.html or directoryname/topicname.html In the first example, the directoryname would be a meaningful name such as "services" or "products" etc... The second example would be the same, but the filename could also be meaningfully named. I have a small personal site I'm working on right now, and I'm wondering, as a direct example, is it better to have something like siteroot/sitemap.html or siteroot/sitemap/ with an index.html that would be 'invisible' so to speak... What do you all say?
Aside from the first one looking more natural, which is more of a visual thing and not a search engine thing, there's no real benefit of one over the other? Is there any drawback to having just the /directoryname/ with an index.html which would be invisible? It's still the index.html file which gets the PR rating, right, but if it's invisible then the page could later be changed to index.php and there would be no PR hit by renaming a page from somename.html to somename.php... or would there be..? min.
In the two examples you gave above.. the second was ending up with two directories.. /something/something/ .. which seemed wasteful and spammy to me. If the choice was between domain.com/something/, and domain.com/something.html... then I would prefer choice number one with the index.html being invisible for the reasons you mentioned.