Google and Very Long Pages

[aristotle]

About a year ago I created a new page on one of my sites, and have been steadily adding new sections to it since then. Each section is about 3-5 paragraphs long with an <h3> subheader, and there are now 40 sections on the page altogether. As I've continued to add content, the page steadily climbed in Google's rankings and reached the number 1 spot for its main keyword about a month ago. (This is an academic subject and there isn't much competition, not even from Wikipedia -- at least not yet.)

The page now has 12,173 words. There are also about 20 images. I don't want to split it up because I think that would lessen its impact. What I'm wondering is how much more content can I add without jeopardizing its number 1 ranking. I've got about 10 more sections in mind (not yet written) that I would like to add. This would bring the word count to about 16,000 words.

I've looked around on the web and found a page that has about 92,000 words of content. Google has indexed it, and the cache shows the entire page. It ranks number 1 for its title, but there's essentially no competition, so I don't think that means much. I also found a 15,000 word page that ranks number 1 for its title, but again there isn't much competition.

Years ago I read somewhere that the optimum word count for a high ranking in Google peaks at about 1000 words, and that rankings gradually drop as the word count departs from that number in both directions, so that very short pages and very long pages will be at a disadvantage. But I don't know if any of that is really true.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with very long pages and how well they do in Google's rankings.

Thank you

[walkman]

No experience in this but I'd guess that 1000 words is more then enough not to worry about thin pages. My other guess is that maybe at 15000 words Google is confused at what to send you and keywords are drowned in all that text. By dividing them the separate pages might be more focused as you'd probably put a subsection in each page, for example: Einstein from 18xx to 19xx.

Other things I'd keep in mind:
if you have ads are they CPM
if you worry about time on site vs bounce rate, you'll obviously see changes.

[smithaa02]

Have a very long page (much more than yours) that does well in long-tail results but not for any primary keywords (too competitive). I am also thinking about breaking this up and am curious as to the answers you get.

I suspect google already sub-divides long pages into pseudo-subpages if that makes sense (they already classify paragraphs separately) so perhaps the effect isn't that great (don't know). My suggestion for what it's worth would be to peel off a subsection at a time onto a new page and to do it slowly while keeping an eye on SERP's. In my case I have a one page website, so I'll probably lose some content to google's boilerplate algorithm which has me nervous (I use a lot of anchor links already for pseudo pages).

In fact if you are creative with anchor links you can make this page presentable and well organized without doing any risky SEO changes.

[tedster]

I suspect google already sub-divides long pages into pseudo-subpages

I've had some success with keeping one long page, but adding fragment identifiers that jump to <h2> sub-heads. Google sometimes indexes those jump links within the snippet.

[wheel]

@ tedster....aaaaaahh! Good idea.

I've got some very long pages on my site as well, just because it's a long topic. I've no intention of paginating for Google, not when my readers want to read the whole article at once. That's as bad as newspapers that get you hooked on an article, then it's continued on page B4. But sections? fabulous idea. Google should be able to figure that out.

[aristotle]

Thanks for the quick replies.

walkman -- there are no ads and no scripts. It's all static html and even with the images, the load time is only about 2.5 seconds.

smithaa02 -- If your page is much longer than mine, it must be really really long. Anyway, I have no intention of splitting my page up, because I want the visitor to get the cumulative impact of all the information on one page. It needs to be together so that different subsections can re-inforce each other in their impact.

tedster -- I may look at that later. For now I'll just go with the existing <h3> section headers. Thanks.

wheel - Do you mind giving me an idea how long your pages are?
Thanks

[wheel]

I sent you a PM with examples. Neither are nearly as long as what you're talking about, more along the lines of just 'really long articles'. But they rank on medium competitive terms.

But I did notice something else - blog articles. Popular blog articles can have huge amounts of comments. Does Google index the comments? I don't know, but they must be aware that length in that case is a sign of popularity.

I still like tedster's idea. Ignore artificial length guidelines, but break the page up into easily identifiable sections.

[smithaa02]

It is that long :( Agree about the cumulative impact... Say I have a directory of 20 similar widgets with descriptions. IMO it much much easier for a visitor to just scroll to what they want to see rather than click 20 separate links. I want them to read everything and know they are too lazy to click. If the topics are dissimilar and don't have that read-on-one sitting synergy then yeah, I prefer pagination/menus.

[aristotle]

Thanks wheel -- I really like the clean design of your pages. I also noticed that there's no code bloat, which I also like. Nice website!

[YieldBuild]

might be a candidate to experiment with rel=next and rel=prev

[netmeg]

I've had some success with keeping one long page, but adding fragment identifiers that jump to <h2> sub-heads. Google sometimes indexes those jump links within the snippet.

I've only got two instances of pages like this, but I have them similarly sectioned off. In fact, I stole the idea from somewhere I saw it, can't remember now where. Maybe it was you, tedster!

[aristotle]

I've done some more looking around on the web and found a Wikipedia page with 36,321 words of content. This page ranks number 1 in Google for its main keyword, for which there is a lot of strong competition.

So from what I've seen so far, it's starting to look like Google doesn't have any problems with giving high rankings to very long pages. Also, over the past year the ranking of my own page kept climbing as I steadily added more content, which could mean that Google actually likes very long pages.