Is it advantageous to have all content on one page?

I have product pages with unique "overview", "features", and "benefits" links. From a user standpoint it's probably nicer to have the content neatly organized into sections, but from a SEO perspective would the page be stronger with all of the info on the same page?

 

No advantage at all, as long as you have navigation links from the home page to the other content pages, google will see all the content, which will be good enough for Google

I suggest a link from the homepage to a site map then from the site map to all your pages

Cheers,

 

I have links to the overview pages on the home page however there really isn't that much text on the overview pages. The home page is currently ranking for the product terms and I was thinking that's because of the split up content on the product pages making them to weak to rank.

 

Actually that's not true. There is an advantage to having fewer internal links.
It is being suggested this could help replace PR sculpting. Have a read of the SEOmoz
Blog for more info.

 

/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

 

That depends on the amount of content you have for each section. If you have enough content about the features to make a complete page, enough about benefits to make a complete page, enough content about pricing to make a complete page, etc. then I would make a page for each so that each page could target different keywords. You'd have a complete set of on-page SEO factors (<title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content, etc.) at your disposal to make of those pages rank for their respective targeted keyword phrases. If I have separate pages for benefits, features, pricing, etc. I would then build a widget/component for each that I could put on my Product Summary page to highlight key features, benefits, and pricing and then have each component link to the corresponding features, benefits, or pricing page.

For example, the benefits widget/component would get rendered within its on <div> maybe sized to appear in a side bar. It would have an <h2> header for the widget perhaps with the value <h2>Benefits of Owning a <insert product name></h2> or <h2><insert product name> Benefits</h2>. I would list a few benefits each with a short description with a link at the bottom of the widget/component linking to the benefits page... So the output of the widget would possibly look something like this (forgive any HTML mistakes... whipping this out on fly):

Notice how I worked the targeted keyword phrase for the Product Summary page (product name) into the <h2> and also tried to work the name or parts of the name into some of the features listed there (bold).

I would create a similar widget/component for the features. If your product has lots of different sizes and pricing options perhaps you build one of these widgets/components highlighting the most popular sizes and pricing and linking to a page that has ALL pricing/size options.

Then place these components at various locations on the Product Summary page. Your product summary page would likely already have HTML elements on it similar to:

<title>Green Widget X95</title>
<h1>Green Widget X95 Product Overview</h1>

The content on the Product Summary page would likely include (hopefully an original, not vendor supplied) description of the product. I would have a widget the rendered a <div> containing my <h1>Green Widget X95</h1> element along with it's description. In fact every part or section of my page would be rendered as independent <div>s by separate components. This makes "piecing together" pages as simple as creating a template in a .php for instance which is basically wireframe of the page. It's basically a bunch of <div>s w/ no content in them. Then you simply call your widget/component functions from within the wireframe <div> where you want them to appear.

With the 3 components rendered as part of the Product Page's template above (features, benefits, pricing) you'd also end up with 3 <h2> elemensts containing your Product Page's targeted keyword phrase possibly like:

<h2>Green Widget X95 Benefits</h2>
<h2>Features of the Green Widget X95</h2>
<h2>Green Widget X95 Pricing</h2>

These same widgets can be used multiple times. On the features page for instance, I'd have a separate widget that rendered a <div> for the main body of the page. The widget would render an <h1>Key Benefits of the Green Widget X95</h1> with the complete list of features and a better description of each than the small widget used on the Product Summary page would have rendered. On this "features" page I would reuse the pricing and benefits sidebar widgets. I'd create a new small sidebar product summary widget that gives a description of the product and links back to the Product Summary page similar to the widgets described above. I would include it on this page...

Similarly the feature page could reuse the benefits, pricing, product summary sidebar widgets... and
the pricing page could reuse the benefits, product summary, and features widgets.

Now you have 4 different pages Product Summary (/green-widgets-X95) linking to 3 other pages (/green-widgets-x95/benefits/, /green-widgets-x95/prices/, /green-widgets-x95/features/).. In fact all 4 are linking to each other. They are all relevant to each other which helps a LOT from an SEO perspective... and they are all adding additional <h2>s and content to each other's pages containing relevant text with keywords targeted by each of those pages.

If you'd really like to get fancy and are running on a CMS or have a database where you are pulling your content from... If you have say 10 benefits listed on your benefits page then have your benefits sidebar widget pull 3 random benefits each time it renders a small spotlight widget item. This means that the benefits sidebar on the product page, pricing page, features page will almost always be different from one another making it hard for Google to identify that section of the page as a duplicate of another section on another page. In fact they will likely be changing each time that Google crawls that page. You can do this even if you're not running on a CMS but it means having multiple versions of the sidebar benefits widget that have hard coded but different lists of features in each.

I would do something similar to this for every product on your site...

Sorry so long but difficult to describe in 2 sentences or less. Hope it helps.

 

I like this idea, very similar to the way Amazon does it.

 

If it's a sales page, yes. For SEO, I say break it up into differing pages.

 

Why is that?

 

have on page on noe content, will that be very hard for viewers to find what they want?
I WOULD SUGGEST a link from the homepage to a site map then from the site map to all your pages
that's more easy to navigate

 

there in no advantage.

 

no advantage. Just have a proper site map and you will find things working

 

Will a site map get google to associate pages together and give the keyword juice of the sub product pages up to the main overview page?

 

No... Simply having the sitemap page link to all of the pages will flow PR from the sitemap page to those pages it links to. If you want PR to flow from the subpages back to the main product page, then the subpages need to link to the main product page. PR flows out of a page through links...

Think of a page as a beer cooler... think of each outbound link as a hole in the bottom of the cooler. Think of PR as juice.

If you have 10 outbound links (holes in the bottom of the cooler) and you pour 1 gallon of juice into the cooler, 1/10th of a gallon of juice should flow out of each hole in the bottom (assuming the cooler is suspended in the air with the bottom level).

If you have 10 outbound links (holes in the bottom of the cooler) and you pour 2 gallons of juice into the cooler, 2/10th of a gallon of juice should flow out of each hole in the bottom (assuming the cooler is suspended in the air with the bottom level).

If you have 20 outbound links (holes in the bottom of the cooler) and you pour 1 gallon of juice into the cooler, 1/20th of a gallon of juice should flow out of each hole in the bottom (assuming the cooler is suspended in the air with the bottom level).

If you have 20 outbound links (holes in the bottom of the cooler) and you pour 2 gallon of juice into the cooler, 1/10th of a gallon of juice should flow out of each hole in the bottom (assuming the cooler is suspended in the air with the bottom level).

As you can see, the more juice your pour into the cooler (the more inbound links to the page) the more PR that will be passed out of each of the outbound links (flow out of the holes). Also the fewer outbound links on the page (fewer holes in the bottom) the more PR that will be passed out of each of the outbound links.

So to maximize the PR of a page, maximize the number of inbound links and minimize the number of outbound links.

 

Thanks Canonical for that explanation. I understand PR flow and I have links on sub pages to the main page I'm just trying to figure out if PR flow can be just as powerful as having the content on the same page. Also isn't PR mostly about backlinks and less about keywords?

 

PR is 100% just a function of the quantity of inbound links and "quality" of inbound links... but "quality" from a PR perspective doesn't mean whether the link is from a good site or bad site... it doesn't mean it's from a relevant vs irrelevant site... it doesn't mean the link text contains your keywords or not... "quality" of an inbound link simply means whether the page linking to you is passing you a little PR or a LOT of PR... in otherwords, whether the page that links to your URL itself has a lot of inbound links and/or quality inbound links.

Matt Cutts explains it very well in his recent post about PR Sculpting. As you can see by his diagram the amount of PR passed out on an outbound link is the PR of the page the link is on divided by the number of outbound links. You can also see that each page that links to your URL can pass your URL a different amount of PR (but it passes all outbound links on the page the same amount).

 

But there's a lot more to ranking then PR so just because PR is transferring it doesn't mean the rest of the pages "juice" is.

 

PR is what people typically are talking about when they speak of "juice" or "link juice".

And you are absolutely correct that your page's PR is a VERY minor ranking factor now days. The PR of your page has very little influence (almost no influence it is so miniscule) on how that page ranks for a particular keyword phrase because PR has nothing to do with keywords.

 

So coming back to the original question then, it does seem like having all the sub sections on the same page would make it a lot more likely to rank or am I missing something?

 

I think you need to consider how many keywords you're targetting and whether you have enough content about each of the potential subpages to answer that. That is what I was trying to say in my original post.

If you have 2 benefits, 1 price, 3 features for a product, it's probably not too feasible to make a separate page for each. There is just not enough content to support the other pages.

But if you have 20 benefits (or say 10 but you can write a paragraph about each), lots of prices for different versions/sizes/options, and/or lots of features... in other words enough content to support separate pages then I think you're better off making separate pages.

The reason I say this is with separate pages, each page can focus on a different keyword phrase. It's always easier to make multiple pages each rank for a different keyword phrase than it is to get a single page to rank for multiple keyword phrases because you get a complete set of on page SEO elements for each page/keyword phrase.

Multipage:

Product Page:
<title>Green Widget X95</a>
<h1>Green Widget X95 Product Summary</a>

Benefits Page:
<title>Green Widget X95 Benefits</a>
<h1>Benefits of theGreen Widget X95 </a>

Features Page:
<title>Green Widget X95 Features</a>
<h1>Features of theGreen Widget X95 </a>

Pricing Page:
<title>Green Widget X95 Pricing</a>
<h1>Prices of theGreen Widget X95 </a>

versus


Single Page:

<title>Green Widget X95 - Pricing - Benefits - Features</a>
<h1>Prices of theGreen Widget X95 </a>