All-in-one or split article?

Is it best to publish one big page, or split the page into two?

[UserFriendly]

When publishing an article that contains two similar but separate topics, is it best to publish a single page that contains both related topics, or would splitting the article into two separate pages be wiser?

If I leave the article as one page, would search engines be put off by the size?

If I split the article into two pages, would search engines be put off by the fact that each page would have to repeat several paragraphs to make sense? I know that Google does not like duplicate paragraphs.

Any recommendations?

[txbakers]

sounds to me like a classic case of "9 of one, 3/4 of a dozen of another"

[ronburk]

Any recommendations?

Example A: An article about widgets is really uni-dimensional. Nobody is ever going to type anything in to find this article except "widget". The article already has so much PR and link-love on the keyword "widget" that it doesn't need any more. Put it all on one page.

Example B: An article about widgets is really multi-dimensional. It covers "widget history", "widget usage", "widget repair", etc., and these are all terms that potential readers might type in to find this useful article. Split it into pages, SEO each page for the highest traffic widget-based search term, cross link as appropriate, and make sure all sections link back to the starting page with anchor text of "widget". For each term (e.g., "widget repair", do a site search of your website and, if there are any relevant pages, make sure they send some link-love to the appropriate page of your multi-page article). If you're doing AdSense, also research what keywords advertisers are bidding on when making the copy (e.g., there may be low bids for "widget repair" and high bids for "DIY widget repair" -- it's an easy tweak to attract the higher paying bid in that case).

I expect that case B is the vastly more common situation for an article of any length.