Advantage of Multiple Page Articles?

[Livenomadic]

I am starting to see a definite trend for CMSs and sites to divide up articles into multple pages.

Can anyone explain to me the advantages to this?

[nalin]

I believe its about (maximizing) banner impressions and creating user interaction with the site. A visitor has to track down next button and in the process exposes themselve to advertising, relevant articles and the like as opposed to a reading the article in a more isolated manner.

[chrisnrae]

5 pages instead of one as far as content and internal backlinks go would be one advantage that would stick out to me. I also like nalin's theory as well ;).

[karmov]

Splitting a longer article can also make it more appealing at first glance. There appears to be less to read so the reader is more willing to quickly zip through the article. Then once you've engaged the reader into something interesting, they'll be more likely to click on through the other pages to read more. If they're faced with a very long article, they may not want to invest the time in reading it.

But mostly it's fodder for more flexibility in your backlinks : )

[4string]

It shows me how captivating my content is. If I get 1000 views on the first page, 900 on the 2nd, but only 100 on the 3rd, something on the 2nd page of my article sucks.

[Shannon Moore]

If I get 1000 views on the first page, 900 on the 2nd, but only 100 on the 3rd, something on the 2nd page of my article sucks.

Or, alternately, for that particular article topic, people are burned out on wanting to read further after 2 "pages" of content. Maybe they've already got their answer. Everything doesn't have to be so engrossing that all users want to read it to conclusion.

Lots of books get read, but never finished...

[golles]

for me it is more pages with good content that can use more links (internal and external) particularly if the article is seperated into sections

[luckystrike]

just wondering is using a CMS wise for the search engines? I mean whenever I search on google it always seems as if html pages are at the top - i think asp pages can be crawled but why the search engine discounting then?

Andy

[bill]

> is using a CMS wise for the search engines?

A CMS can output static HTML pages. There's almost no way to tell that a site is using some CMS packages. The SEs will never know if you do it right. And even if they did know there's no penalty for using a CMS.

Some CMS packages don't generate SE friendly page names and paths. That's what people are telling you to watch out for. In many cases that can be fixed with some creative server-side rewriting.

[Reflection]

As a user I hate multi-page articles. These days, with mouse wheels, scrolling is easy. Whereas clicking a link and loading a new page every few paragraphs, is a pain.

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Sorry, what does CMS stand for?

[goodroi]

Content
Management
System