Advice on a big page

[tedster]

I'm looking for input on how to handle a few critical pages for a site I am optimizing. The challenge is that each page, as originally designed, has over 1500 words of text. The rest of the site has a nice mix of page sizes.

It's good text, full of targetted KWs and important user content.

Normally I would break that much content up into several smaller pages. However, this site design uses some very smart DHTML and the user doesn't see one long page -- they get a little section menu and click from section to section in a very natural way.

Because all the sections are really coded on one HTML page there is no download time for a new menu choice -- the switch is instantaneous.

So I really like the design from a usability standpoint, and that makes me want to keep these pages as designed. The total page weights involved are only 19kb and 23kb, even with that much text on each one.

My concern is with the search engines. Will rankings take a hit with that much text, or can I make it an advantage? I know that WPG Page critic strongly suggests fewer words, but don;t they get their stats by measuring what's top ranked rather than by knowing that a page WILL punished for being over a certain size, all other things being equal.

This one has me crazy. Keyword frequency is of course extremely high -- that's one effect of a long page -- but density is reasonable.

Any input on this will be highly valued. Thanks.

[Brett_Tabke]

Depends on the k involved in the text. Anything over 64k of text will almost always get nuked. Ink has been allowing larger pages, but Alta is getting strict on the 64k limit. Anything over 100k of total html is history on all the major engines.

[rcjordan]

based on my sites, size is going to hurt.

[Brett_Tabke]

I was referring to text as in stripped/indexed html...

[tedster]

Thanks.

So I know I'm way below the kb danger zone. Stripped of tags and stop words, these pages don't even hit 20k. Full HTML page weight for download -- including all associated files -- is only 23k to 25k. External style sheets work miracles on file size!

The thing that got me going was WPG Page Critic's note that total text should max in the 700 word count area. I'm even more inclined to go ahead with the 1600 word pages now.

This gets me thinking. If I ever do have a page that's way too big but feel it needs to stay that way for some reason ... could I get it past the SEs by referencing an external js file that did a document.write for a partial chunk of the text?

The content the js file writes out wouldn't get indexed, but by being smart in choosing which section to have the javascript create, I could serve the SE's some optimized stuff.

Any reason this wouldn't work that you can see? It might also be a way to keep some information off the HTML page that dilutes the theme too much but still has value for the reader.

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't agree that large text size of 1600 words is a burden. As long as it has good word distribution (no loaded kw's) and true paragraphs. Put in those (p) tags - they work. Div's will work in a pitch. keep the tables down to a minimum (not as bad as it used to be, but 3levels deep is as far as I will go.

[fantomaster]

If you can do it all, put all that content in a .txt file (or split it across several).
Cross link heavily, including links in the
text file itself. Then submit - it's done wonders for our rankings, simply submitting the downloadable issues of our newsletter.

[tedster]

Thanks. That sounds worth doing, especially since the client is planning downloadable versions of these articles.