When I have new content I can't wait to get it indexed.  So even if I am not promoting it yet on the homepage I will put up links to it on relevant pages just to get spiders into it.

Five articles is no worry.

Google has been doing this for a while.

Sometimes they add your URL to the end of a title tag.

I have some title tags that are short but have my URL at the end.  Google is adding my URL on top of that.  Looks like this.....

Keywords at Egols.com | egols.com

Sometimes they replace your title tag with words that  match the querry.

I object to this because they have overwritten a title tag that with my marketing message such as "free shipping" or a kickass price that pulls in buyers.

Up until about six months ago I had a blog that was focused on news content.  The blog got several posts per day of very fresh news.  New posts on that blog would be indexed within moments and land on the first page of google - sometimes in difficult SERPs.  The rankings would stick for a while - not more than 24 to 48 hours and then quickly slip down the SERPs and disappear.

My guess is that google recognized the "newsy" nature of that blog (lots of queries with "news" as the keyword) and would give that blog short-term good rankings for queries that were getting a surge in volume.  Again, that is a guess. But I saw the same treatment that you described.

Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site.  Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog.  The article pages were evergreen content.  So, I would redirect those posts to the article page.  I thought that it helped rankings.

I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.

This guy is a high brow.  Tell him to write content that will earn links from the resource pages of law school websites and that will beat everyone - if he has what it takes to pull it off.

I have lots of articles of various lengths on my website.

I have also been improving lots of short content that was written a few years ago.

The articles that perform best are those that make a very detailed presentation about the topic and are long enough to address the most important subtopics that you would find doing keyword research.  These typically go a minimum of 1000 words and can be as long as several thousand - in addition they have many photos, sometimes graphs, sometimes data tables or a video.

These long articles rank well and get LOTS of long tail keyword traffic.  Think about it... there are a large number of different relevant words on the page and I addressed all of the major keyword topics for the subject area.

Years ago I tossed up a lot of short pages that have 30 to 50 words and a photo about a topic, then a couple years later I upgraded them to a couple hundred words and a couple photos, now I am making them 1000-3000 words and 6 to 12 photos.  With each improvement rankings improved and long tail traffic exploded.

I don't break the long articles into several pages - that would kill a lot of the long tail keyword combinations, the article would not be as impressive in presentation, and don't you hate clicking through those long articles that span a dozen pages that are very slow to load?

Even if the article is monetized on the basis of pageviews I believe that the improved rankings and traffic will make up for the pageview loss.  Plus the increased sharing will be a bonus.

I am confident that they are helpful.  In small markets, nothing more than these can put a website on the first page.   Iin large competitive markets, more will be needed.