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
-
Removing indexed pages
Hi all, this is my first post so be kind 🙂 - I have a one page Wordpress site that has the Yoast plugin installed. Unfortunately, when I first submitted the site's XML sitemap to the Google Search Console, I didn't check the Yoast settings and it submitted some example files from a theme demo I was using. These got indexed, which is a pain, so now I am trying to remove them. Originally I did a bunch of 301's but that didn't remove them from (at least not after about a month) - so now I have set up 410's - These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?
Technical SEO | | Jettynz
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.0 -
Page that appears on SERPs is not the page that has been optimized for users
This may seem like a pretty newbie question, but I haven't been able to find any answers to it (I may not be looking correctly). My site used to rank decently for the KW "Gold name necklace" with this page in the search results:http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=302This was the page that I was working on optimizing for user experience (load time, image quality, ease of use, etc.) since this page was were users were getting to via search. A couple months ago the Google SERP's started showing this page for the same query (also ranked a little lower, but not important for this specific question):http://www.mynamenecklace.co.uk/Products.aspx?p=314Which is a white gold version of the necklaces. This is not what most users have in mind (when searching for gold name necklace) so it's much less effective and engaging.How do I tell Google to go back to old page/ give preference to older page / tell them that we have a better version of the page / etc. without having to noindex any of the content? Both of these pages have value and are for different queries, so I can't canonical them to a single page. As far as external links go, more links are pointing to the Yellow gold version and not the white gold one.Any ideas on how to remedy this?Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Don340 -
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 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Redirect Multiple Domains
This is a follow-up question from one posted earlier this month. I can't linked to that because it's a private question so I'm trying to summarize it below. We have a number of domains – about 20 - (e.g. www.propertysharp.com) that point to our main domain ip adress (www.propertyshark.com) and share the same content. This is no black-hat strategy whatsoever, the domains were acquired several years ago in order to help people who mistyped the websites url to reach their desired destination. The question was whether to redirect them to our main domain or not. Pros were the reportedly millions of incoming links from these domains - cons was the fact that lots of issues regarding duplicate content could arise and we actually saw lots of some pages from these domains ranking in the search engines. We were recommended to redirect them, but to take it gradually. I have a simple question - what does gradually mean - one domain per week, per month?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0 -
Hundreds of 404 Pages, What Should I do?
Hi, My client just had there website redeveloped within wordpress. I just ran a crawl errors test for their website using Google Webmasters. I discovered that the client has about six hundred, 404 pages. Most of the error pages originated from their previous image gallery. I already have a custom 404 page set-up, but is there something else I should be doing? Is it worth while to 301 redirect every single page within the .htaccess file, or will Google filter these pages out of its index naturally? Thanks Mozers!
Technical SEO | | calindaniel0