Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
-
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page.
Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
-
I want to address this question from a couple of perspectives....
USERS: As Dana said... Users prefer single long pages. These long pages with lots of content, lots of subtopics and lots of images are impressive when a person lands on them. That immediately shows them the depth and richness of your content and they can quickly scan your subheadings to see what you have to offer. These will more readily produce likes, tweets, links, etc. when compared to broken pages.
SEO: I have experimented with long and multiple short pages. I get more traffic from long pages because of the diversity of words that they contain. This brings in LOTS more long tail traffic. And, if visitors are liking, tweeting and linking you might get more search traffic.
MONETIZATION: This is a downside if you are showing ads. You get fewer impressions and if there is a limit on the number of ads you can display per page your ad density will be lower and thus less income. However, if your traffic is higher from the increased long tail and better rankings then you might recover the lost impressions per visitor with more visitors.
-
A few years ago there was a benefit of breaking up a document into smaller chunks - say, for every h2 (second level headings) The idea was that rather than having one big document, you could have lots of small ones to rank on all your h2's. And it seemed to work pretty well. Today, I'm finding that the content that does the best from an seo perspective is my longest content. And that the big content does way better than the sum of the parts. So, I would no longer recommend chunking up your articles, unless they're just too long to read. Some of my best articles have 2-3 thousand words. I also find a nice correlation between number of comments and my best posts. So I leave them all on the same page, making it super long. For some examples of super long content that are doing great from an seo perspective, check out the group interviews on my site (wordstream.com). Those articles have +10 minutes on the page on average and generate tons of traffic for my site. Google these for example: Ppc bid management guide, Importance of ab testing, (etc.)
-
Google did some user testing on this topic, to find out if users preferred longer pages or paginated pages. According to their research, users preferred longer pages because there is always latency when moving from one page to the next. Here's the video where a Googler cites that research: http://youtu.be/njn8uXTWiGg If you want to have it both ways, you could always break your content into pages, but put a "View All" option at the top. Personally, I am one of those folks who doesn't mind scrolling down through comments. If given the choice to continue on to a second page of comments, I probably wouldn't.
From an SEO standpoint, provided the pagination is handled properly, I don't think there's an advantage one way or the other, unless you take into consideration that your bounce rate could potentially go up with paginated pages. Even if it did though, I doubt that would significantly hurt you from an overall SEO viewpoint.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Filter pages - Shopify
Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture/black
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
/collections/living-room-furniture/fabric Is that ok to make all the above filter/tag pages canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture OR I keep them as it is, so /collections/living-room-furniture/black can rank for filter keywords, example: black living room furniture, /collections/living-room-furniture/fabric fabric living room furniture etc. Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Note - already removed the main category content from filter pages, updated meta tags as well. Please advice, thank you0 -
Very wierd pages. 2900 403 errors in page crawl for a site that only has 140 pages.
Hi there, I just made a crawl of the website of one of my clients with the crawl tool from moz. I have 2900 403 errors and there is only 140 pages on the website. I will give an exemple of what the crawl error gives me. | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | http://www.mysite.com/en/www.mysite.com/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/en/index.html#?lang=en | | | | | | | | | | There are 2900 pages like this. I have tried visiting the pages and they work, but they are only html pages without CSS. Can you guys help me to see what the problems is. We have experienced huge drops in traffic since Septembre.
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
How to determine which pages are not indexed
Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.
Technical SEO | | priceseo1 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Redirecting over-optimised pages
Hi One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site. I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks. My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Same Video on Multiple Pages and Sites... Duplicate Issues?
We're rolling out quite a bit of pro video and hosting on a 3-party platform/player (likely BrightCove) that also allows us to have the URL reside on our domain. Here is a scenario for a particular video asset: A. It's on a product page that the video is relevant for. B. We have an entry on our blog with the video C. We have a separate section of our site "Video Library" that provides a centralized view of all videos. It's there too. D. We eventually give the video to other sites (bloggers, industry educational sites etc) for outreach and link-building. A through C on our domain are all for user experience as every page is very relevant, but are there any duplicate video issues here? We would likely only have the transcript on the product page (though we're open to suggestions). Any related feedback would be appreciated. We want to make this scalable and done properly from the beginning (will be rolling out 1000+ videos in 2010)
Technical SEO | | SEOPA0 -
Is this 404 page indexed?
I have a URL that when searched for shows up in the Google index as the first result but does not have any title or description attached to it. When you click on the link it goes to a 404 page. Is it simply that Google is removing it from the index and is in some sort of transitional phase or could there be another reason.
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0