Page Content - The Long and Short of It

[Spuzzum]

Hi,

Is it better to have one page with a lot of content, or is it better to break that content up into multiple pages?

For example:

Let’s say I am designing a site that has information about Skiing, specifically the tickets you need to buy to ski. There might be 10 different options available to you to buy, each requiring their own description and information (i.e. daily pass, season pass, locals pass, etc...)

Is it better to have a single page that holds all that information (maybe using a FAQ style link system), or is it better to break all that content up so that each ticket type has it's own page?

What I am really wondering about is which one of these options does Google search like better? I also plan to place Adsense on my site eventually, so is there an advantage to having more pages?

Thanks a lot! I'm new to all this, so I look forward to any advice that you can offer. :)

[tedster]

Hello spuzzum, and welcome to the forums.

This is always a judgement call. Some key factors would be:

1. Is there enough unique content for each page. If not, they may all go in the tank since they look like "stub" pages.

2. What's best for the user? Would they be better served by collecting all the options on one page?

3. Does the content naturally fall into sub-groups? In some cases, creating a small set of pages can work out better than an all-or-nothing approach.

4. With many pages, how many total links end up on the master page? If you go much over 100, that can be problematic.

[vero]

I've found that the advantage of putting a bunch of related topics on one page is that you are more likely to get traffic from unusual search term combinations. This can be good if you're in a very competitive field.

For example, if, instead of the proverbial red widgets page, blue widgets page, and pink widgets page, if you just have a single page for widgets, you' might turn up in a search for red widgets with pink and blue trim... whatever.

The disadvantage is that if you ever want to bust up the page, Google may not rank your new sub-topic pages high - it will still send people to the original longer page, even if you now have a specific page for pink widgets.

[annej]

Could you do an overall page giving brief into on all the tickets then to individual pages with more info in individual tickets? Kind of cover both possibilities that way.

[ecmedia]

It also depends if you will have contextual ads or not. Generally with contextual ads it is better to have a page with narrowly targeted content rather than everything about a topic.