Is one big page better than many small ones?

[superclown2]

Forgive me if this has been covered before - I suppose it's a bit basic - but does anyone have any feelings about whether a site selling different coloured widgets should have them all on one page, or on a separate page for each colour? It's certainly easier to get a lot of external links for one page than for several but would the more concentrated focus that separate pages would give, coupled with internal linking, compensate for this?

[tedster]

No cut and dried answer here. Sometimes a very small page can rank very well, possibly because the focus of content is so easy to analyze. Then other times, as I just mentioned another thread [webmasterworld.com], a page with thousands of words whoops the competition.

I always try for a mix of page lengths. There have been times when the algo seemed to prefer short pages, and other times when it took some length, so I like to have a bit of both on a site. Recently, I can't say that either short or long pages have an edge.