Very Long Pages

Any Downside re the SEs?

[glengara]

I'm working on a number of pages that each have 2000 words or so; and would prefer not to break them up so that each can be downloaded in it's entirety.

A solution I'm considering is giving the appearance of multiple pages by using different urls that will bring the viewer to the particular category on the same page.
Any downside to this solution re the SEs?

[Brett_Tabke]

SE's generally are not fond of large pages. Their seo value starts to decline at around 50k of html. Sure, there are occasions when they tweak the algo's for higer sizes, but 50k is about the break even point. Some engines love very small pages in the under 10-12k range (google).

[tedster]

I'm pretty sure that you can do 2,000 words in one SE-friendly page, unless there are a lot of other demands being place on your code in addition to the article itself.

I have a client who regularly publishes scholarly papers in the 6,000 to 10,000 word range. I just finished working on a 6,100 word paper for them, and the marked up article itself (just the article in HTML, with no menus, inline styles or script, etc.) was just under 40kb.

So, with careful design for the other page elements, and keeping the CSS and JavaScript in external files, I can get rather large articles published on one page and still keep the spiders happy. In fact, to blow my own horn a bit, the client recently "complained" that when they do web research these days, their own site is often dominating the search results, rather than giving them access to new information.

There is a another practical challenge to making a page too big. On some vintage notebooks/laptops scrolling is not very easy. Especially when the handle of the scrollbar gets too small it can be challenging. So I usually break up these big articles into pages of 2,000 words or less, and include a PDF file download of the whole article for printing purposes. And Google indexes those as well.

[glengara]

Interesting, as I've learnt since posting this that Google(allegedly) prefers pages under500 words.
I'm on an expensive dial-up account, and usually download articles to read offline; I was hoping to structure it in a way so that one click does the trick.

[tedster]

A lot of the results depends on how competitive the keywords are. If the information is in an area where only a handful of web authors know anything about SEO, then it's a cakewalk, even if the page is long. But I sure wouldn't try a 5,000 word article about the "little blue pill"!

[glengara]

It was suggested a "printer friendly" version may be a solution; four/five 500 word pages, with the "Full Monty" in the PF format.
Could that be feasable?

[Brett_Tabke]

Certainly. If you do the "full monty" (I like that), you could also offer an alternative full version in html.