Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
-
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice.We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination.
On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text.
Here's my question:
1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles?
Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context.What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter?2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles.
3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page?
Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much!Jim
-
Guys, thanks.
-
Just to weigh in, I would agree with Jeff in that 1 long page is much better from both a usability and SEO standpoint.
In my view, multiple pages should only exist if it is in the context of a hub page. For example, consider a page that is for slow cooker recipes. Instead of having hundreds of recipes on 1 page, it would make sense to have a sub-page for each recipe. Eg:
- Example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/
- example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/lamb-stew
- example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/chicken-casserole
Check out the site architecture section on the following link for a good explanation:
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
Best of luck!
-Oli
-
Jim-
I'm not a big fan of articles that are broken up onto many pages.
The thinking in the past has been:
- Break up the pages, and you get more page views. (Great if you are serving advertising.)
- The page will (possibly) load more quickly because you have less content on each page.
- Many marketing agencies want everything above the fold, so shorter pages "look better."
The reality, I think:
- Users hate having to go to the bottom of a page, then to click on the "more" option, and then wait 3-6 seconds for the page to load. Especially on a mobile device.
- It is more complex to have duplicate page titles. I'd recommend the rel=next / rel=previous tags, that could help in this case.
My $0.02 is that you should go with the single, long page articles. I have found that search engines love, love, love pages that have a lot of content (as long as it's well written). A page with 12,000 words of content will often outrank something with 250 words of marketing fluff.
If in doubt, though, test it out, and convert one or two over and test out how they're ranked.
Thanks!
- Jeff
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
-
Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?
Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura
Web Design | | LauraFalls1 -
Multi region stores, one domain
hi all Wondering if I could get some options on the pros and cons of using one domain for two stores targeting different regions. My website is a fashion retailer, targted at the female market. In addition to the stores the site has a number of blogs, articles etc on. At present we have a co.uk domain and a .com which targets the US market. The trouble with this split approach is having seo two sites at once, in addition to adding content to two sites etc. we are considering combining the stores into one domain and the having the U.S. Shop at /us and UK store at /UK - in wmt we will specifiy the directories as targeted to a specific location, the hotel language etc will be showing UK and U.S. English to further help geo targeting. we are thinking that, in theory, managing just one site will mean it's easier to build the authority and brand name. Pretty much all of the blog and article content is non region specific so it is relevant to both markets, it will also reduce the need to generate unique content for two sites at once. Is there any major downside to merging the sites like this. At present the UK site is da 4 and U.S. site da 0 - they are both pretty new and one of the problems we have at the moment is building up two sites at once. i welcome any opinions. thanks. Carl
Web Design | | WonkyDog0 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Wordpress: Pages vs Posts vs Portfolio
Hi All, I'm looking to put pen to paper and design my main structual template for my website. I will be creating the new site in Wordpress. My understanding of Wordpress is broken into the Static Pages, Posts and Portfolio. Static PAGE
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
Static one off content.
No tags, categories or archived Posts
content entries, which is listed in reverse chronological order.
Update post entry to maintain overall freshness of your website.
tags, categories & archived Portfolio
????? Question What are the benefits of a portfolio page over Static Pages & Posts When creating feature rich articles should i use static pages, posts or portfolio. Thanks Mark0 -
Best Practice issue: Modx vs Wordpress
Lately I've been working a lot with Modx to create a new site for our own firm as well for other projects. But so far I haven't seen the advantages for SEO purposes other then the fact that with ModX you can manage almost everything yourself including snippets etc without to much effort. Wordpress is a known factor for blogging and since the last 2 years or so for websites. My question is: Which platform is better suited for SEO purposes? Which should I invest my time in? ModX or Wordpress? Hope to hear your thought on the matter
Web Design | | JarnoNijzing0 -
How to put 'Link to this article' HTML code at bottom of article & is it helpful?
Hello, I was thinking about putting a box down at the bottom of my client's main articles that let's the reader easily copy the html code it takes to link to the article they're reading. Maybe I'd put it after the author bio. Do any of you do this? If so, what format do you use? It has to look nice of course. This is a non-techie industry. Thanks.
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Decreasing Page Load Time with Placeholder Images - Good Idea or Bad Idea?
In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image. When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question. However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image. How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?
Web Design | | airnwater0 -
Best method to stop crawler access to extra Nav Menu
Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text. We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages. You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu. Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else. I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this? I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else. Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all. Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider. What would you do and why? Thanks, James
Web Design | | DWJames0