The question: Does Google care about the position of a page on your server? Does it make a difference if your page is in the root directory or in a sub directory? And what is the effect of your URL structure in Google rankings?
A lot of webmasters think that Google prefers pages that are in the root directory and if an URL contains many trailing slashes then Google might not think that the page is important in relation to the other pages.
This statement is probably not true.
The visibility of a page counts, not its position
If a page your site is visible, linked throughout your site, has the right keywords and it has inbound links, the page will be indexed and ranked by Google. Lot of pages on today’s websites are created dynamically and the URL that is displayed in the browser presents only a virtual structure that is not really available on the server. As there are no real folders on the server, search engines won’t find a valuable ranking signal if they look at things like presence or absence of directories.
What does this mean?
If you want to show the search engines that a page on your site is important, link to it from your other pages on your site so it can easily be found, also make sure you use the right page title (lot of people forget this, but it is one of the most important factors). A page with many inbound links will get the attention that it deservers from the spiders / crawlers.
True, it is way better to have trailing slashes then ?var=val type URL… I have many pages ranking high being url/category/subcategory/type/pagename…
Relevant inbound links will always be one of the most important factors
Same here hackcorp, and Ava; you are right about that!