I'm wondering how Google treats multi page articles. For example, say an article is split over four pages, in your sitemap you would have: http://mysite.com/myarticle/1/ http://mysite.com/myarticle/2/ http://mysite.com/myarticle/3/ http://mysite.com/myarticle/4/ So 4 almost identical URLs in the same site, plus same page title across four pages. Wonder how Google treats this. Bad pagerank? Same pagerank? What is your idea/experience?
I think google doesn't like these kinds of articles. You have to make it easy for the spider proper crawl your site
One more thing to consider is that sometimes the traffic will land on page 2, 3 or 4 and bounce quick. Short, 1 page articles work best.
Well indeed there's a sitemap.xml that helps the spider. As for the the bounce risk, it depends a lot how the page shows, so there must be an evidence that the article has been splitted in more parts, like showing an article index, current page number etc. The only risk is pagerank degradation due to similar URLs and pagetitles....
Multiple page articles can work to your advantage if you add something to the title for each page, and in effect create a hierarchical linking structure. Basically, you turn one long article into a section, with a number of smaller articles. That has some minor disadvantages (fewer search terms per page) but it can help a lot, as it gives the impression of a richer site. For example, instead of just "How to Make Apple Pie" you could have "How to Make Apple Pie: Getting Started" then "How to Make Apple Pie: The Dough" and so on. If you're just going to keep the same title, then don't split it up. It just annoys users.
Hi ... lots of good ideas offered in response to a good question. You might try "my-article-1," "my-article-2" and so forth for the titles. Maybe use words instead of numbers, one rather than 1. Although chance is the best explanation for anything G does, I seem to find hyphenated titles indexed more quickly and more often, on my sites. Hope this helps. Good luck.
To clarify, I'm using Wordpress. Behind the scenes, the article/post is just one, and it is splitted automatically by a plugin depending on tags inside the post; it also creates and index, and automatically adds a number to the URL as above. Can't change the page title at the moment, but I can modify the page header (what's between the <H1></H1>, it is believed G gives great relevance to this) Summary of current capabilities: +/- Description ***************************************************** + Greater, professional-like look & feel + faster in-article navigation + increased page impressions (depends a lot on the page magics!) ? Multiple URLs with a trailing slash + page number - Same <title> content + Customizable <H1> & page content - flatter per-page keyword density - Higher bad PR risk.. Who knows, maybe Google Support may answer to this question? However, it could be possible to wipe out some of the minus points just not using the automated plugin, publishing multiple posts pertaining the same article (alà paragraphs), each one with a proper URL and page <title>. Once done post an article as the "main page".. Of course, no automation, quite more work