The site was now over 700 pages and maintenance had become a problem.. I was also concerned that the Google Bot was not going deep and was only indexing the top level pages. The site had a five deep hierarchy in some places as some of the books had a page/chapter for each day of the year.
public_html/books/come-ye-apart/December./ 14-joseph-of-arimathea.html
Conventional wisdom says that Google will not browse more than three levels deep unless it is a very important site. The catch-22 is that Google will not discover the rich and important content of the site unless is browses the whole site. The solution to this dilemma is to create third-level or sub-domains. The first-level or top-domain domain consists of the final extension to the site name com, org, net etc.. The second-level is of the form mnsi.net, jr-miller.com and third-level is of the form www.jr-miller.com, directory.jr-miller.com, com-ye-apart.jr-miller.com, every-day-of-life.jr-miller.com, morning-thoughts.jr-miller.com, in-green-pastures.jr-miller.com. The last six examples are all the third-level domains I currently own.
The directory references every page of text in the whole site and is only two levels deep. All the other sub-domains are three levels deep. This is was just what Google ordered.
Other advantages are that the largest sub-domain now contains less than 380 pages and it is much easier to maintain. Link checking takes less time, and the directory structure on my development machine has become far more elegant and manageable.
Discussions and tutorials of and about third-level domains are rather esoteric, to the extent that they are incomprehensible. In practice, for the Web-Master at least, it is very easy. One types in the third level domain and presses the button. Then you add a new directory to your FTP software. The skill lies in finding a hosting company that allows you to add sub-domains and doesn't charge you. I can heartily recommend Hosting Insiders.
My first job, one summer, was working as a hod-carrier, and I am endevouring to promote this career page by adding extra internal links to it. To learn about hods and their employment go to hod carrier.