Is there an advantage to hard linking your web pages versus from the root directory?

[herogoggles]

For instance having the link read versus In terms of page rank and indexing?

[iamjustinm]

Not in terms of page rank or indexing, but a lot of people suggest doing this in case your website gets 'scraped' by someone's bot who is stealing your content to automatically throw up on their own spammy site.If you use hard linking in your urls, you will atleast get a link back to you for your content if this happens.Plus it helps to notify you when someone's stolen your content if you browse your inlinks and notice it.