I have a web site at http://cableorganizer.com  Almost all of my pages
are contained in subdirectories such as
http://cableorganizer.com/products.  I did this because I think it is
much more elegant than http://cableorganizer.com/products.html. 
Here's my question.

If many people link to my page
http://cableorganizer.com/how-to-organize, will that help my
popularity for http://cableorganizer.com and also for
http://cableorganizer.com/products?  If they link to my root domain
home page will that help the subdirectories?

What does Google consider to be a site?  Is the site only what is in
the subdirectory or on the domain?

Please do not guess on the answer here.  Your answer should be based
upon:

1) Your own outside observations of Google site popularity; or
2) Proven research that you can rely on; or,
3) Actual knowledge of the Google page rank algorithm

I am getting conflicting advice on this and need to be sure I am not
hurting myself with my directory structures.