Keep long articles, or cut them up through multiple pages?

[Cutter]

I'm going back and re-optimizing some of my websites I built rather quickly last year.

Here is the question, should I cut long pages up into multiple pages, or leave them together? I noticed Chris has cut up the articles on websitepublisher.net

I can think of several pros and cons here.

Pros:

-Makes Adsense more visable
-Keeps top bidders (as opposed to inserting 3 instances throughout the long page/article)
-Makes the pages easier to read for visitors
-Makes the pages more targetable

Cons:

-Readers enter site in the middle of an article
-PR/ranking drops, harder for robots to find, for pages farther away from main site

[chromate]

A few more pros...

- Increased page impressions for any given article (more money from CPM ads)
- Easier to optimize a page for search engines.

I believe that it's good to keep traffic flowing through your site instead of just being static on a single page. That way you can run them through many different offers they might be interested in.

[moonshield]

Another Con:

Annoying when done in very short pages.

[Chris]

Its going to depend on the site, for this site I cut them up for all of the stated pros.

If you split them up though, you can't just use "next" or "click here" anchor text for page navigation. Use something a little more descriptive (meaning you'll need a title for each page).

[Chris]

-Readers enter site in the middle of an article

Not really a con if this is a search engine referral. Chances are without splitting up the content you wouldn't have been listed with this page and so they would have never visited in the first place.

[Todd W]

Its going to depend on the site, for this site I cut them up for all of the stated pros.

If you split them up though, you can't just use "next" or "click here" anchor text for page navigation. Use something a little more descriptive (meaning you'll need a title for each page).

I think your articles are split up nicely here.

[Cutter]

If you split them up though, you can't just use "next" or "click here" anchor text for page navigation. Use something a little more descriptive (meaning you'll need a title for each page).

Thanks, I probably would have missed that one!

[davesplace1]

I would go with the many short pages. Seems like you make more from your ads that away. The pros outweight the cons on this one IMHO.

[tomek]

>> should I cut long pages up into multiple pages?
yes, but don't make them too short

[James]

I'd suggest, also, that you make each page based on a specific part of the article, much like http://webmonkey.com has. This'll allow for good SEO on smaller terms, which can generate more traffic to your website, and will allow your pages to be a good length, while also letting your visitors read just the part they're looking for if they come from Google.

[Cutter]

Thanks guys, I've already started implementing this on one of my sites.

[Cutter]

Ok, here is the follow up after doing this for about a week.

The CPM got cut in half, pageviews went down just a little bit.

This is one of those things you just got to test to see what will happen.

[James]

Oh wow, that's not too fantastic.

Chris, did you start off with 'split' articles, or did you impliment it after trying it out first?

[ogito]

Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but did someone else tried splitting articles? Does the the CTR goes down and CPM up?

[Emancipator]

i thought about splitting pages but just never got around to doing it. I have code complete if there is interest I can post it on the coding board.