I like this topic. When my site was first made, my webmaster put one page in my site that I could do myself, via writing in "notepad" and dropping in a text file only. I didn't know diddly about websites. So I'd add article after article, until my articles page had 30 articles on it. After a month, I figured out how a picture was added. Then I found out how to bold text and stuff. So I asked my webmaster "is this code change how all the other pages are done?" and he said "yes". If a few months, I gave it a go, and took over my own site work, fighting through the mistakes, but also leaving the huge 160K (text) page with articles. Finally I realized that if I split the page into 30 pages, I could have almost 90 ads on the site instead of just 3 ads. I will say that the huge page ranked higher (then) than most of my smaller pages. But my traffic increase, ad income increased, and it eliminated the huge "biblical scroll" size page and all the "back to the top" buttons As far as targeting the same keywords on separate pages, my site shows that what one person shared earlier should not happen. I have several pages that target many of the same keywords. But in general, if I split a page into several, its due to each one being a bit different, and its easy to pick different vocabulary. And more different keywords brings in a whole extra bunch of visitors. Like if I have two pages on drainage, I'll say "drain pipe" a lot on one page, and "drain tile" or "drain line" on the other page, and cross-link the pages anyway.
This is very true we tend to forget about our visitors and tend to do what search engines want us to do. I say do what is better for visitors.
A fellow Oregonian! I dunno where Jacksonville is.. but.. Hello anyway LadyH (portland born n raised.)
Another thing to bear in mind is the depth of links i.e. You have a seven page article. The first page of that article is linked to from the articles page. Each subsequent page is linked to from the bottom of the previous. Theoretically you will end up with pages at the end being 7-8 links down in your linking structure. The deeper the linking structure needed to reach a page - the harder it is to get indexed. The obvious solution is to make sure you link to all pages at some point from relatively early in the chain (thus making for a more shallow link structure) Dylan
I usually make a quick little php include when I do things that are a group.. So a group of articles, or a group of reviews.. etc.. then you have a lil mini side menu or something that links all the articles in the group together... all the links show on every page, and are then accessible to serps
It looks like most people think short pages are better overall, for both visitors and search engines. Although I personally prefer longer pages that can cover an entire topic on one page, I may be with the minority. Time to change and adapt. What got me started thinking about this topic is that all the big guys, MSNBC, CNN, Yahoo, etc. break up their stories into several pages. Although their No.1 reason may be more ad revenue, I'll bet they have done some sort of usability studies to confirm that their visitors prefer, or at least are OK with, shorter pages.
break up the content into subheadings and provide an index so users can jump to the exact area they want