Paging of Articles

[Livenomadic]

I run a content site with a few hundred articles.

Currently, if the visitor visits my category "Blue Widgets" they are shown ALL articles about Blue Widgets on a single page with a short blurb about the article:

TITLE TITLE
Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb

TITLE TITLE
Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb

TITLE TITLE
Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb

TITLE TITLE
Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb Blurb

However, the new version of the CMS will have including "paging", which means that only a certain number of articles appear on one page, and the rest and bumped to page 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.. like google results.

The URL of the first category page remains the same:

mysite.com/categories/blue-widget/

But page 2 looks like this:

mysite.com/categories/blue-widget/?Page=2

Search Engine Question:

Do you think paging will hurt of help my ranking with google? I am currently placed very well with google and I don't want to fall off my position because of this.

This could be good because then my site would technically have more pages for google to spider.

This could be bad because then my category pages (which rank pretty high) will lose ranking because their keywords (which are part of the blurbs) will be divided into 4-5 pages.

User Question:

Do you guys like it when sites use paging?

Personally I find it annoying when I cannot view all the articles in a category, but have to click next, next, next until I find them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[troels nybo nielsen]

It may actually prove to be an advantage to have your keywords spread over more pages. You can optimize each page for fewer keywords than now while still letting it give some degree of support to other pages that are optimized for other keywords.

And from the user's point of view? I dislike long pages and prefer to have long articles spread over several pages, but in my view a hierarchical structure is better than paging if it is possible. Can you make some more sub-categories?