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
-
Multiple sub domain appearing
Hi Everyone, Hope were well!. Have a strange one!!. New clients website http://www.allsee-tech.com. Just found out he is appearing for every subdomain possible. a.alsee-tech.com b.allsee-tech.com. I have requested htaccess as this is where I think the issue lies but he advises there isn't anything out of place there. Any ideas in case it isn't? Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
How to Break Up a Page with Too Many Links
My client has a live page with 100+ links subdivided into 10 categories that each have great potential keyword targeting opportunities. I'd like to improve this page and my intuition is to split it into 11 pages, one page with links to all the others and a bit of content about each. Here's an example of the potential IA: Dog Rescue Groups
Technical SEO | | elenarox
Golden Retriever Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Cocker Spaniel Rescue - description
Poodle Rescue - description
Labrador Retriever Rescue - description
etc. --------- Golden Retriever Rescue
Link 1 - description
Link 2 - description
Link 3 - description Is this a good idea and will I see a big traffic drop overall at first? Also, these are all internal links, not external.0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Too Many On-Page Links on a Blog
I have a question about the number of on-page links on a page and the implications on how we're viewed by search engines. After SEOmoz crawls our website, we consistently get notifications that some of our pages have "Too Many On-Page Links." These are always limited to pages on our blog, and largely a function of our tag cloud (~ 30 links) plus categories (10 links) plus popular posts (5 links). These all display on every blog post in the sidebar. How significant a problem is this? And, if you think it is a significant problem, what would you suggest to remedy the problem? Here's a link to our blog in case it helps: http://wiredimpact.com/blog/ The above page currently is listed as having 138 links. Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks so much. David
Technical SEO | | WiredImpact0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Multiple pages - Similar keywords
I'm working on a site with a parent page and two minor pages all dealing with the primary/root keyword "log siding" - How do I optimize all three pages without bastardization of the primary keyword? Parent page - keyword: half-log-siding and log-siding Child Pages (linking from the parent) cedar-log-siding and Pine-log-siding. They all feature "log-siding" and grade well for that keyword (as well as their own long-tail keywords), yet I think based on my rank tracking that Google is unhappy with the multiple pages all (seemingly focused) on log-siding. Any ideas how I can effectively target all the long-tail keywords within their respective landing pages and not draw a penalty from Google towards my parent page and the root keyword? Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | Marvo0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590