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I've notice a few sites split a topic or article over several pages connect by links. Does the site benefit in better PR this way? If so, how should the titles of the pages and the name of the files be named. Should all these pages be under the same directory?
Akogo
I publish for my readers and therefore arange pages etc. elemets in article whatever is most usable to them, file names are just id's for the articles, ex. 22380.html etc. I try to keep articles no more than 3-5 page downs and dont worry about googlebot at that moment.
I believe google likes a good content, and the definition of good content is the true content. just go with true content, do your best for your readers and dont worry about google and googlebots will love and value your work.
However, usability standards recommend page length be limited to three page lengths at most, so if your articles are longer, then you would need to split them in order to maximize usability for your audience.
I would suggest, if you want to minimize the possibility that someone will visit one of the sub pages because it was indexed by a SE, then you may want the meta tags on your sub pages to read noindex,nofollow, thus limiting the robots to indexing the first page of each article.
As to title and filenames and locations, I think all the articles should be maintained in the same directory, which means both that I think you should have one directory entitled "articles" in which all articles are kept AND that each sub page should be kept in the same directory as the first page. Likewise, your titles need to reflect precisely where someone is. For instance, page 1 of 3, page 2 of 3, page 3 of 3. Although "continued" might suffice, I think the previous choice better, especially if you have a REALLY lengthy article spread over more than three pages.
You might also want to have a summary of links to one side, including on each page all the links that appear in the whole article. Then, if someone remembers that this article contained a link to someplace that interested them, but they didn't have the time to open each and every page to find that link, and you didn't have a search capacity on your site, then they could just pull up your article, find the summary of links, and go directly to what appealed to them.
:)
Is this what you guys meant with file size( point D)?
Brett made a great list of recommendations there, but I would not concentrate on the page size only for ranking or PR (yes for spidering and uploading for the visitor). I have yet to see proof for small size (alone) accounting for better rankings or PR if you stay within the 100k area.
Search for "health sciences" and you see 73k pages outranking 4k (with search query in title) pages.
One of the reasons splitting large pages into smaller linked ones works well is that there are more titles and links than with one page. Each title and link gives the opportunity within the Google algo to highlight extra subjects.
A large and content rich page may get more inbound external links as "authority" than a smaller one with a link to "health sciences part 2"
I divide many of my articles into pages on various subtopics--not so much to please Google as to organize content efficiently for my readers.
For example, a six-page article on a town might consist of the following pages:
- An introduction
- Museums and attractions
- Hotels
- Restaurants
- How to get there, local transportation
- Other resources (Web links)
This really isn't much different from the way a guidebook chapter or magazine article might be organized, except for having a page break between each section instead of having page breaks dictated by production or advertising requirements.
Mind you, what's good for the reader is also good for Google--and vice versa. A page with a tightly focused topic helps Google provide relevant search results to the user.
