I’d like to point out kbf at SEO Refugee got me started on this with his 428th Post. It is recommended reading. :-)

In the realms of SEO forums and blogs there has been much discussion over the benefits of long pages with lots of content versus several smaller pages where the content is broken up. I’ve been experimenting with the two ways to go here at 14thC and have uncovered some interesting observations. But first, the arguments involved.

Theory: Long pages are better

Long pages contain more keywords and are considered more of an “authority” by the search engines.

Theory: Short pages are better

When you break a long article into several small pages you can target tighter keywords. You can also display more ads which is good if you have Adsense or affiliates on your site. And reader attention online is much shorter so by breaking up content you help make sure the content gets read.

I ended up in this debate when asking for a review of the last redesign of 14thC at Cre8asiteforums. Toward the middle of that thread the point was made that my home page was too long and that the optimum page length is 500 words. I was already starting to break up long essays into several short articles to see if that would be better (like the Domain Name and branding series).

And the winner is…

Long pages are considered an authority by both the search engines and the viewer. The standard rules for copywriting apply: write as much as needed but not one word more. A single comprehensive page gives people something to reference. It’s something that naturally gathers links!

For example, the most popular articles on 14thC are:

1. Get Free Backlinks
2. Get Indexed Fast
3. About Social Bookmarks

Each one of these articles is pretty comprehensive. They give backgrounds about the subject matter, a breakdown of major players and several tips.

These articles have all picked up their backlinks naturally. That is, I didn’t exchange links or buy links or even submit these pages to directories with the appropriate anchor text. I promoted them through a few forums and included temporary links to them in my sig file for a short time (about a month each). Since these articles were written about a year ago Yahoo! says the links look like:

Get Free Backlinks 58
Get Indexed Fast 52
About Social Bookmarks 59

So each article has between 50-60 backlinks which is not a lot but since they occurred naturally I think it’s pretty good!

If you look at the sources of those links most of them are either blogs or tools with a few forums thrown in.

Getting links from blogs and forums is fairly common though it is always great to be acknowledged like that!

But getting links from tools surprised me and it turns out these are some of the best links of all! Every day I get unique visitors who get to these articles because the author of a tool cited one of these articles as background for what their tool does. This has happened mostwith the social bookmarking article. It seems my explanation for that (at the time) new type of web site was good enough that instead of writing their own take on the “SB phenomenon” the tool creators were happy to point back at me! And I am continuing to pick up new links for these articles even a year after they were initially posted.

This couldn’t and wouldn’t happen with an article series. For proof, look at Digg. How often does someone link to a series of articles? Almost never! Getting Dugg happens to single pages not whole sites or sections of sites. Viewers want the information easy to find and looking in one page is much easier than looking across several pages.

Another point of proof is the blog post series I started about Before You Build where my traffic dropped overnight. This may be because my viewers weren’t interested in the “pre-process” of building a site but I actually think it’s a matter of two dreaded words: Part 1. Serial articles infer a commitment from the viewer that I don’t think goes over very well.

Donna at SEO-Scoop claims serial linkbait is a winner. And she may be right… I thought I had some success with the follow-up SB article: More About Social Bookmarking but over the long-term the original article is still collecting links and generating traffic while the follow-up falls behind. More on this in a minute.

My best guess is that serial content is better for short-term promotion than long-term results. I’ll try again when my audience is larger and more vocal.

Long pages and SEO

It turns out Google likes long pages. Sure the fact that these pages pick up more links is a pretty good reason but there is more to it. Google uses several methods to determine what pages are most relevant to a search query. The way I think of it is like this:

Site #1 mentions X and Y and has heavy emphasis through onpage factors and anchor text for the term [widgets].

Site #2 mentions X and Z and has heavy emphasis through onpage factors and anchor text for the term [widgets].

Site #3 mentions X, Y and Z and has heavy emphasis through onpage factors and anchor text for the term [widgets].

Which do you thing Google likes best? The one that is most comprehensive. Google doesn’t have to know what the details are or what they mean just look for patterns in content coverage among the sites that are clearly trying to rank well for a certain term.

Supporting articles count, too

While breaking up a long article into several small ones may not be best, having several supporting articles for the long one works great.

I mentioned the follow-up SB article started off well and then fell behind. I think this has to do with the way Google determines relevancy. Google looks at a whole site to determine its theme.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts has mentioned that starting a site with a tight niche and then branching out after you are established is a smart way to go. I think this is sound marketing advice but I also think it gives a little insight into how Google is placing sites in the SERPs. If a site is about too many things it confuses the search engines… especially if the site is new. But you can also use this part of the algo to strengthen established sites.

With each of the article series that I posted one page always dominates the others as far as referral traffic from the SEs. This seems to be the page the SEs have decided is the “core” page. As far as I can tell everything else is equal including the number of inbound links. Once the SEs make that determination the other related pages drop in the SERPs for the more general terms within that category, though they may still pick up some long tail searches.

I’ve noticed that by adding related articles to 14thC the original article jumps in the SERPs and there is more referral traffic. Even if the new article doesn’t do very well just addressing the theme in multiple places lets the SEs know you are serious about the subject. And by adding this blog and citing the articles they have grabbed even more SE referrals! Since adding Scout, the SE referral traffic to my articles has almost doubled! (I do attribute another factor to some of this as well but I’ll save that for another time.)
Final thoughts

The SEs are likely to think the first page they find on a given topic is your “core” page so make sure the page you want for that is indexed before adding additional articles on the same theme.

Smaller articles should probably be 300-500 words long.

“Long” pages don’t actually have to be that long: just authoritative and comprehensive. If you can say it in less words do so. It’s about the coverage, not the length.

Sites that are especially comprehensive and authoritative may get special treatment from the SEs with multiple links in the first position like this search for [Honda]. Or the indented second result. Google calls these “snippets“. Of course you can only get multiple coverage like this if you have multiple pages discussing the subject.

Next Article: Site Structure: Usability vs. SEO Previous Article: In the Company of Giants