Wordpress single-page vs. multi-page posts for SEO

[corepartner]

How do search engines view a single long post vs. the same content divided into pages using the WordPress nextpage code?

Is one or the other better for SEO?

Is there an easy way to provide a multi-page version for online reading, and a single-page version for printing and search engines?

I have also noticed that when you divided a single post into a multi, wordpress provides the same title for all the pages and do not even index the sub the next page.

Please provide me insight on how to use multi pages for posts in wordpress.

[mslina2002]

I have actually tried both and there are negative and positive for both.

Long post:
Positive - keyword rich, lots of content, better for SEO
Negative - long load time, visitors tend to get bored, higher bounce rate may be seen as negative by search engines

Long post divided into several pages:
Positive - faster loadtime, more pageviews, more eyeballs on your ads, visitors may be less bored
Negative - less content, less keywords, less SEO impact, vistors may be annoyed and not click to the next page thus may result in more bounce

When I have paginated my post, I have:
(1) Given the subsequent pages a new title and description by simply adding "(Page 2)" to the title and description to prevent dupe title and description flags in WMT. You'll have to do that in the header.

(2) I have used Yoast plugin to create canonical tag to the first page. But I have also hacked the plugin so that each page is indexed on their own. However, personally I didn't like it as much to see page 2 of a post floating in the index together with page 1 elsewhere, so I deleted the hack.

[mhansen]

I think it really depends on your type of content as to whether you need single or multi-pages per post. What kind of word count are you talking about?

That said, I have used a plugin in the past called "Post Tabs" that allows you write a long post, then break it into a tabbed interface (one url, hidden divs)

MH

[mslina2002]

mhansen, that is a great solution.

Is that done with jQuery and do you see any effect on load times?

[mhansen]

@mslina2002 - It is done with JQuery... I noticed no effect on load times at all. Its a pretty flexible plugin, and is free.

Not sure abut the linking policy for things like this, so I wont link to it. But it's pretty easy to locate searching by name in the repository. You can apply your own styles to the tabs etc.

Disclosure: no relationship to the plugin... only used and liked it! :)

[htmlbasictutor]

Google's GoogleWebmasterHelp on YouTube posted a video on the 13th that might be of some help to you.

youtube.com/watch?v=njn8uXTWiGg (it it 16 mins + long)

[learnforsuccess]

i have the same problem but i think long page is better SEO in longer run.