Should I divide my longer content, article pages?

if they are very very long for one page.

[Skeleton]

Currently i am in the design phase of my new site. I have noticed that some of my content pages will be very long for 1 page. Should i divide them into 2-3 pages and make a navigation for those pages? The reason i am asking is that i thought these pages worth more ad blocks :) If i make them 1 long page style they will have 2 ad blocks per page. But in the other case they will have (2*pages) ad blocks and they will have more clicks IMO. What do you think? Thanks.

[sailorjwd]

From my experience it is better to make three pages with one ad block at top of each page. That should maximize EPC for each page. You may also get a little more diversity in ads that get displayed.

[europeforvisitors]

Shorter pages are likely to be more palatable to users. Back in the late 1990s, WIRED News reported on a study of clicking vs. scrolling in which users preferred a longer article with multiple pages to a shorter article on one page that required extensive scrolling. And here's the interesting part: When asked, users thought the longer multiple-page article was shorter than the article that required scrolling (even though the opposite was true).

On my own site, I usually break articles into multiple pages for several reasons:

1) The shorter pages look more readable;

2) I can use a photo at the top of each page, which works better than embedding photos in the article;

3) I can divide the article into subtopics, which helps with organization and--as a bonus--creates focused pages that do better in the search engines. For example, I just wrote an article on the subway system in a major city, and the article is divided by subtopic into four pages:

1 - Introduction
2 - Types of tickets and how to buy them
3 - How to enter the turnstiles and ride the trains
4 - Related Web links

This four-page structure is a lot more user-friendly than one long toilet-paper roll of an article. The fact that it creates additional listing opportunities in the search engines and displays more AdSense ads for the same amount of text (but with just one ad per page) is a serendipitous dose of icing on the cake.

[fearlessrick]

Just noticed this thread and I think multiple pages is the way to go. The International Herald Tribune online runs a very cool three column format which I've always admired. They manage to take a 600-800 word article and spread it across three pages. They are running "Sponsored Links" which are likely adsense, below the articles.

Not only is the format very clean, I'll bet their ad guys told the execs how great their page view numbers would be once implemented across the site. Pretty slick if you ask me.

[bts111]

Nice post, as always, EFV :)

[hunderdown]

I second the motion that splitting up long articles is a good idea, but be sure to check and see how the individual pages are performing. I recently posted a long, feature-type article in three pages, and CTR was so abysmal that I've taken AdSense off it completely. People were reading through to the end, and then NOT clicking on the ads I'd placed there....

[ganeshcp]

Shorter articles = lesser keywords = better targeting

[david_uk]

I split an extremely long article into several pages to make it more readable. It doesn't perform that well on adsense purely because I hived it off to a separate domain. I wanted to retain the document in it's original form, and offer visitors the option of reading it in a more readable fashion, and at a different intellecual level. I haven't been too pro-active in promoting the new domain as yet.

However, one of the pages has made it back to the original domain, and does perform well.

My personal feeling is that splitting the long article makes sense from the visitors point of view, and it may well work better on adsense for you, so I'd give it a go.

[jchampliaud]

Shorter articles = lesser keywords = better targeting

I’m not sure that having fewer keywords helps with targeting, at least not always. I’ve a few short articles on my site that have gotten way of topic ads. Never really knew why. I agree that a long article should be broken up, mostly for readability as EFV pointed out.

[robsynnott]

This is a good idea even if you're not using ads. Users tend to hate huge pages.

[ken_b]

Apparently I wasn't paying attention again today. I posted a related message a bit ago. Here's a copy of it.

-----------------------------------

A few days ago I split up a very long page. Now I have 7 pages instead of one. This needed to be done from a user friendly perspective. I've been putting it off because it meant changing internal links on over a hundred other pages. But I thought I'd report the impact on Adsense here.

The page obviously was huge. I'm using a 120x600 skyscraper on the right side, same as before.

Early results show CTR a little up, not a lot.

But Impressions are way up, more than triple. Some of that is that the SEs are still sending people to the old, now first, page and they have to click thru if they want to see widgets from a later era. Before they'd just have to scroll down the one long page. So I expect that some of the additional page views will vaporize as the SEs index the new pages.

Earnings are up inline with the increase in pageviews. (That's the total earnings for the seven pages compared to the one old page.)

[hunderdown]

ken_b, I think you've made an important point--it helps if each page has its own distinct subject.

[ken_b]

Just a follow up to my previous post.

First, in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I should have mentioned in my previous post that I was partly spurred to make this change by comments JanetHuggard kindly offered about my site in another thread [webmasterworld.com]. I knew this needed to be done, but hearing it from someone else helped motivate me to do it. Thanks JanetHuggard.

It's now a couple weeks into this change. As I thought, now that the new pages have made it into the index and are all getting direct visits from the SEs (almost all Google) the total page views have dropped a bit, but they are still far more than the single page got before, on a daily basis.

Targeting seems to be a bit better, maybe because the pages are more focused, and epc seems a bit higher. But we all know how targeting and epc can fluctuate.

CTR has apparently settled at about twice the previous level.

[mrfragger]

I agree it's better to split up pages to increase page views. However, one major thing your overlooking is the more content on a paticular subject in one long page your much more likely to get better ranking in search pages.

To sum it up:

split them up = more page views, higher alexa ranking

one long page = possibly more traffic from search engines

[ken_b]

Actually, as I mentioned above, the 7 pages I have now are get far more se traffic than the single page did.

That pattern has been the case since I started getting se referals.

Over the years I've divided what started out as a single page into what is now about 30 pages, each more focused than their predecessors.

Everytime I've done that traffic to those pages from the SEs has increased. Everytime. Other than my own experience I can't prove it, but I believe that if you have enough content on a big page that ranks well and you subdivide the page, the new pages will rank as well, if not better. At least that's been my experience.

I still have a few pages that need dividing, I just need to focus on getting it done. :)

Build new pages, subdivide old pages, keep time sensitive pages up to date, choices, choices, choices.... This could turn into work! :)

[adb64]

Hi,

Most of my articles are split-up over several pages, but I also give the visitor the possibility to display the whole article on one page, e.g. for easier printing of the article.
An all-in-one page attracts more visitors via search engines as the words they search for are otherwise spread over several pages but together present on the all-in-one page. This all-in-one pages is also offered to SE spiders, next to the separate pages.

Regards,
Arjan

[Swebbie]

The 'Holy Grail' is to write an article that imparts good info to your readers AND has a good focus on one or more oft-searched keyword phrases. With a bit of practice, you can learn to write pretty much anything in a way that satisfies both.

Once you do, clearly the multiple page approach is preferable. I have a site on which I was posting 600-word articles in the early phases, then switched to 300-word pages with a tighter focus. It's no contest. The shorter, more focused articles pull in a LOT more traffic from organic SERPs than do the longer ones, when you compare it on a per-word basis. In other words, twice as many articles with half as many words trumps half as many articles with twice the words. And the feedback I get from readers has always been positive about the shorter reads. It's win-win.

But you need to do your homework and pick topics that are actually searched for in order to reap the traffic results (unless you have an established site with high repeat visitor numbers or a ton of IBL's from related sites).

[MikeNoLastName]

As a publisher I agree the CTR and earnings are better when breaking it up, probably because it gives the reader a chance to look around while wasting time loading Yet Another New Browser Page (YANBP). However, as a net surfer, I'm probably the publishers worst nightmare. Personally I HATE articles which are spread across multiple pages because when you try to print them to save or give/FAX to someone:
1. It takes a separate multi-click print operation for every page.
2. It wastes a ton of paper since the site header is usally on the top of each page and there is more chance the last line of the page will wind up printing at the top of a new page of paper. So you usually end up with twice as many pages to FAX and a printed article that looks like $h1t!

We've kept all our pages (up to 50K+) which we KNOW are frequently printed out for reference, all as one since the very beginning. When Adsense came along we simply inserted ads either spaced down the page periodically at paragraph breaks in leaderboards or as skyscrapers down one side or the other.

If you're going to break it up, give an option like, I think it is Time magazine online and/or NYT, which when you select the printer-friendly version COMBINES all the pages into one tightly formated one WITHOUT ads and with a narrow logo header at the top and a single line copyright at the bottom! I find I am 10 times more likely to print these sort of pages intact (with a "print all" option) than the former type. When there's garbage breaking up the text and the text is spread accross many pages I've frequently even gone to the extent of copying the text piece-meal into a word processor to print for my own use, which means your graphic header, URL or copyright in most cases gets lost too.

[icedowl]

..when you select the printer-friendly version COMBINES all the pages into one tightly formated one..

I use Mambo and it does this quite nicely. Might be that other Content Management Systems do it too.

[MikeNoLastName]

ken_b,
When you say:
"but I believe that if you have enough content on a big page that ranks well and you subdivide the page, the new pages will rank as well, if not better."
do you mean you take the original page and add mutliple links to each page of the content which used to be there to the new multiple pages (i.e. using it like a table of contents).
pg 1
/ ¦ \
pg2 3 4
Or do you mean you cut off the original page after, say, the first paragraph and single link to a string of the rest in single-linked pages which thread to each other like chapters?
pg1 - pg2 - pg3 - pg4

I could see the former working to improve SE ranking, but not the later. Also are you counting just impressions as people flip flop around looking for what they want, or unique visitors?

[ken_b]

Mike;

These pages that I'm splitting up are long index pages. Basically just a page with a lot of links to other pages. The one I just split up had around 140 links on it, with a blank line in between each one. So the page was maybe 20 - 30 screens long @ 800x600.

I can't imagine anyone would print these pages.

Visitors can use these pages to find their way to widgets of a given year, about half do that. Another group use the next/previous links on the individual widget image pages to flip through widgets of that time. This last group will frequently find their way to these index pages if they want to see widgets fom a different year, decade, or make.

The individual widget pages are not even close to being big enough to break up. They are basically photo gallery pages with pretty limited image related text.

[ken_b]

do you mean you take the original page and add mutliple links to each page of the content which used to be there to the new multiple pages (i.e. using it like a table of contents).

Yes, that's it.