Lapizuli - 12:14 am on Sep 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

Tedster, thank you for sharing that great information. We write long articles and have been trying to resolve the problem of how to split them up.

Some ideas off the top of my head, as long as one is manually fine-tuning each page's SEO:

Strategically choose cut-off points that are cliffhangers of a sort, to encourage readers to click to page 2.

Place any ads on subsequent pages NOT at the top, or in any place where they might interrupt the easy continuation of access. Readers going to page 2 might be engrossed enough to be irritated at the loading interruption but not so engrossed that they won't just click out. I find that when I first navigate to a site, I don't mind a bit of a wait to load the page, but if my attempt to navigate the site is met by similar lag, I'm outta there.

For certain kinds of articles - highly structured, with clear subsections, and not perforce linear - provide a brief quick links / table of contents with subhead titles spanning all the pages of the article that can be navigated from each page, or at least from the top of the first.

An option for readers, once landed, to view the whole article as one page. (Well, they do it for ecommerce product listings, why not for content? Is there a duplicate content issue? Fear of copying & pasting?)

In-text links to subsections of article, clearly delineated as part of the same article.

What I haven't seen, but what I'd like to see as a user, is some kind of cue right there at the top of page 1 that this is a multi-page article, and maybe even an option to take a shortcut.