Too many folders???

It seems that my pages are being indexed by the url with the least folders, or closest to the domain, first.

www.domain.com/folder/index.html gets indexed before www.domain.com/folder/folder/folder/index.html

Is this an SEO drawback, or just part of the process? The deepest any of my pages go is the second example, and it's a well constructed ladder of keywords. I read in a few articles that you shouldn't go past 4 "/", and that's where I'm at. But the end of the ladder is the meat and potatos in content. That's why I'm asking.

What do you think?

Two things spring to mind, one is that search engine bots will only travel so far looking for content and it may be that those pages are just too deep into the site to get visits. Have you got server logs to see where the bots are going? Have they ever been to those pages?

Secondly, it's a good rule of thumb for Usability that nothing be more than three clicks away from anything else on a website, is there a reason that you have pages going so deep into the hierarchy? I try to restrict my site levels to three, including the home page , maybe four if I have to.

of course, its just a simple common sense if you think about it...bots will really do crawl first the closest than the farthest...with this, for sure it will get index first.