I'm interested in the ramifications of breaking up content across pages versus placing it all on one page.

In this post (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showpost.php?p=99195&postcount=11), sportsguy writes, "I remembered once reading that if you wanted your site to be taken seriously by the engines, you'd need at least 100 or so pages of honest, unique content." I'm not clear how much per-page text he was getting at.

Do the search engines treat one page of twenty paragraphs and twenty pages of one paragraph content the same? What are the advantages and disadvantages of various page sizes?

My primary concern, of course, is figuring out the right amount of content that works for readers, but I'd also like to take into consideration how the search engines will treat the content - I'd like for the readers to actually find the content.

I guess the answer would be that a page should have enough content on it to cover the topic and be of value to a visitor.

Sometimes we've heard that one search engine or another is favoring long pages or short pages (meaning a little or a lot of content) at one time or another, but that can always change so it's probably good to have a variety with some long and some short.

If you put 75 words on a page - and actually the count words - you can see that it really isn't very much. I'd say no less than 75-100, and probably best if it's something like 250-500 words.

Are you referring to content sites or product/sales sites?

Thanks for the reply. This is a content site. We have articles of various lengths, but which can be > 10,000 words. That is a lot to put on a single page.

Any page splitting must be automated. If I split the content, it would be easiest, technically, to split it by logical section. I just looked at a pending article, and sampled sections ranging from 65 words to 454 words. (There is nothing preventing a section from being a sentence or two.) There are around 40 sections in that article, so splitting by section would require forty clicks to read the entire article.

Those tech-review sites that split up their content into itty-bitty chunks drive me nuts. It is not my goal to use pagination to multiply page views.

I could select a target range, and write code to group sections until the content falls in that range, but the presentation might turn out awkward, and the code for generating a table of contents linking into the sections would become more complicated.

10,000 words is overkill.... it should be in sections and each section be a page.
We usually work with 500 words and if we have info over that number we can find ways of breaking it into smaller groups... just use a link at the bottom with good anchor text and you tighten things with your internal text links too.

If you do split content over multiple pages, watch out that you don't inadvertently create duplicate content by using identical Title tags, META description tags, etc. Each page is a golden opportunity to bring somebody into your site, but this only works if the content is unique so you need to match the head tags with the content on the page.

Also, Google's recent patent on detecting duplicate content means that you need a certain amount of unique text on a page, or it will be relegated to the "supplemental" index.

I just saw this today in a new page that only had contact info, but all the navigation elements were identical to other pages in the new site. The contact info was obviously insufficient, so that page started out life online as being in Google's supplemental index...

Brian M

I just saw this today in a new page that only had contact info, but all the navigation elements were identical to other pages in the new site. The contact info was obviously insufficient, so that page started out life online as being in Google's supplemental index...Yep, a previous paper (or patent) from a while back made mention of a specific number of words on a page. Can't recall which one.

I've seen something similar with link pages, Brian. It took a certain amount of "content" on the page to even get indexed.

I just saw this today in a new page that only had contact info, but all the navigation elements were identical to other pages in the new site. The contact info was obviously insufficient, so that page started out life online as being in Google's supplemental index...

Brian M

I would hope that the search engines would be able to pick out the elements common among all pages. If they can't now, it shouldn't be long before they can. It is my understanding that some crawlers purposely request a non-existent page to determine what a custom 404 page looks like, so page template removal can't be far behind. It is a pretty simple CS problem to solve.

Thanks for all of the replies. I think I'll write some code to page the content by section, but group multiple sections together, when needed, to ensure 300-500 words per page. I'll see what that looks like and go from there.

The thing is, I really appeciate Wikipedia, for instance, putting an entire article on a single page. But that might be a special case.

Somewhere in a book I have on site conversion and copywriting there's specific mention (based on studies) of the number of word limits for reader comprehension/retention. I'll see if I can dig it out this week and will post their figures.

I think it's somewhere around 300 words, and for longer articles I seem to remember 2 thousand. I'll have to find it to be sure.

For users like yourself (and me) who hate articles split up into umpteen pages, I'd recommend a Print version that contains the entire article in a single page. Just be sure to put noindex in the robots tag.

For users like yourself (and me) who hate articles split up into umpteen pages, I'd recommend a Print version that contains the entire article in a single page. Just be sure to put noindex in the robots tag.

That's a good idea.

Also, Google's recent patent on detecting duplicate content means that you need a certain amount of unique text on a page, or it will be relegated to the "supplemental" index.

I just saw this today in a new page that only had contact info, but all the navigation elements were identical to other pages in the new site. The contact info was obviously insufficient, so that page started out life online as being in Google's supplemental index...


I just came across a page that contained exactly 37 words of unique content, out of 351 words on the page. It appeared in the top half of Google's first page of results, with a quarter of a million results available. It also answered my question perfectly.

I just came across a page that contained exactly 37 words of unique content, out of 351 words on the page. It appeared in the top half of Google's first page of results, with a quarter of a million results available. It also answered my question perfectly.

Would you mind sharing the page URL?

I think this http://www.sitepoint.com/article/indexing-limits-where-bots-stop might be interesting to have a look at.