We are developing a website where there will be two distinct types of content: galleries and photos.It makes little sense to use URL paths like /gallery/photo as some photos can appear in more than one gallery (and duplication of content is bad); so the current logic is to have a single depth on the site (/photo1, /photo2, /photo3, /gallery1, etc).Will this impact upon SEO as the number of single depth pages increases?, is it better for Search Engines in general to see a more RESTful interface (/galleries/gallery, /photos/photo1, etc)?, or is there a better way to handle this?P.S.: The photos will have a landing page of their own with deep textual content (as will the galleries).
URL paths and their effect on SEO
seo;path;url
No, it shouldn't matter if you have thousands of pages at the same level. I've seen sites that have all their content at the root level because they are under the impression it makes a big difference for SEO. (Incidentally the sites do rank well but I don't think the lack of organization has any bearing on that.)I think the structure you are proposing is good, if I have it correctly:A set of category pages at /galleries/rabbitsAll image landing pages appearing to be in one folder like /photos/bunny1A good alternative would be to have a main category along with the other categories/tags. You get the added benefit of an extra keyword in the URL, plus it may be easier for users to understand the site structure.With the above example, bunny1 might be under the rabbits and fluffy categories but the main category would be rabbits. You might then have this structure:Category pages of /gallery/rabbits/ and /gallery/fluffy/, both showing the bunny1 image.Image page of /gallery/rabbits/bunny1