How much is too much content for a home-page?

[trx]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to implement a strategy where I put a 20,000 word article on my home-page. It won't be a super-long page, this content will be divided into nested tabs.

The content will also be found on individual pages (corresponding to the tabs) on the site, but these will have a canonical tag pointing to the home page,

Will I get penalized for this kind of structure?

Cheers,

JC

[AlanMosley]

Bing has just bloged about missused conanoicals will be ignored, I would not do what you suggest, if the algorithm does not pick it up, a manual look at your site would i think be seen as spam.

[ICTADVIS]

Hi JC

I was always taught that having 200-400 words on a page is what to aim for. But, in my quest over the years to test pages, I also found that an article page containing a 1000 words is OK. There was a test done some years ago, I can't remember by who, but this person tested the pages with the major search engines and out of the big 3 Bing was quite happy handling a 1000 word page but his stats showed differing results from Google and Yahoo. (If anyone can remember that test please comment as I am sure it was a Moz person??).

Another test I conducted was using tabs on a HOME page. I had in place about 7 tabs with content broken down into each tab. Prior to putting these in place the page only had 1 tab and around 300-400 words.

After adding in the other tabs, the page disappeared off page 1 SERPS for terms it had previously ranked for. At the time it was unknown what the issue was, so I had to go through a process to find out. The page had a reasonable number of inbound links pointing at it, so I did not increase those, and for about 8 to 10 weeks of tweaking and fine tuning I finally took the decision to revert the page back to what it had been i.e. 300-400 words of content and 1 tab. Wallah the page within 24 hours returned to ranking for the terms it had previously. My next experiment was to break my content down into 2 tabs and my page remained ranking.

After further tests I would conclude that too many tabs was the issue and in my opinion Google was penalising my page because it would look like I was 'hiding' text on the page in amongst these tabs.

I still believe Google likes big websites, Wikipedia is testimony to that, and look at how all the subject matter is broken down in that site. Therefore my suggestion to you would be to review your content, how many 'themes' and 'topics' are there within it, and break it down into specific pages of around 300-400 words with a few relevant links between the pages. I believe this will work much better for you.