To Paginate, or Not to Paginate

April 19th, 2006 by Chris

When creating a new article driven site a website publisher often must decide if they will paginate their articles, that is cut them up into multiple pages, or to simply have longer one page articles. This issue is complicated if you’re coding your own CMS as adding page capabilities adds one more degree of complexity to the process.

In general, as evidenced by this site, I am in favor of taking long articles and making them multipage, there are quite a few reasons for my opinion.

The most obvious benefit is that you’re increasing the number of pages in your site, which should increase your traffic. It is not the same to search engines if you have all the content on one page, or if you split it up, so the traffic gained from each method will not be equivalent.

If you have a one page article with 3 meatball recipes, say Swedish, BBQ, and Italian, you will certainly be listed on searches related to all three. However, by paginating your articles you can target each section with it’s own unique title tag, and of course the title tag is the most important onpage factor for SEO so that alone should up your rankings for each section of content within the article. So your rankings for the individual recipes should improve. You can of course also target other things based on section, such as meta tags and header tags.

To get the full benefit from pagination it is important that you use meaningful identifiers to create the navigation between pages. This means not using page numbers or generic “next page” text as the anchor text for your navigation links. You’ll want to use keyword rich anchor text describing each section (look at an article on this site for an example). An article’s subpages might not get many incoming links, so it is important that the links they do get have good anchor text.

Another benefit is increasing pageviews. If you have CPM based advertising running then the number of pageviews per visitor can have a large affect on your earnings. If a visitor is reading an article and if it only takes them one page to read that article then you’ll receive less total pageviews from this visitor than if the article was divided into multiple pages. If your site currently has long one page articles, even turning them into 2 page articles could possibly nearly double your existing impressions. That could really boost your bottom line.

One final reason to do this is that it also helps CPC advertising. CPC advertising works best when it is near navigation, by placing pagination navigation at the bottom of your article pages you’ll increase the CTR of any CPC ads, like Google Adsense, at the bottom of your pages.

Finally, I once read a study many years ago (say 4ish) about how users do not like to scroll. So supposedly multipage articles enhance the user experience as well.

I’m not saying that all articles should be multipage, afterall some are just too short. But in general I like to paginate anything longer than 2 screen heights, and I recommend you do the same.

7 Responses to “To Paginate, or Not to Paginate”

  1. Dennis Pallett  Says:

    “Finally, I once read a study many years ago (say 4ish) about how users do not like to scroll. So supposedly multipage articles enhance the user experience as well.”

    Indeed, I read something similar, but I also read that users don’t like really short-pages and clicking dozens of times.

    The best way is probably semi-long pages, and about 3 or 4.

    Usually, I have around 500 words per page, and then 3-4 pages (depending on the length of my articles).

  2. Peach  Says:

    Hey Chris,
    on my sites, I put rel=”nofollow” on links that are non-contextual, such as page numbers and read-more links, as to purify the anchor text of contextual links. Do you think this will make any difference with the major search engines? Or do you think the more general non-contectual link texts are filtered out anyways. (such as “read more” or “previous post”)

  3. Saša Ebach  Says:

    “Finally, I once read a study many years ago (say 4ish) about how users do not like to scroll. So supposedly multipage articles enhance the user experience as well.”

    Users *say* they don’t like to scroll, but studies have shown that the usability is actually better if they do.

    http://www.uie.com/articles/page_scrolling/

    Personally I hate to click. I can just hit my space bar if i want to read the next page. I think the optimal solution is to have a print version with the full text. Since I read like 10 articles every day I will just print them out anyway. Reading all of those on the screen is just too tiresome. And please, put nothing in the printed page that disturbs my reading (like layout or navigation).

  4. Chromate  Says:

    I wonder if the thing about users preferring not to scroll is dated now? 3 or 4 years ago it wasn’t common place for a mouse to have a middle tracking wheel. Now it’s quite usual. Now if I use a mouse without one, I still find myself stroking it with my index finger, expecting the page to move!

    I personally prefer to scroll, but not too far. Some sites break their articles up in to too many pages and it’s just annoying.

    I agree that there are sometimes SEO benefits though.

  5. Josh  Says:

    Users may not like to scroll… but from a user perspective, please, please, please if you are going to paginate like this (which is a great idea from an SEO perspective) include a printable version of your articles with all of the contents on one page. I am the type of user who does not like to read long articles on a computer screen (one page or ten, it doesn’t make a difference) … so I often print them out. Forcing me to click, then print, then click, then print, etc. Or copy and paste each page into a Word file before I print is rather annoying and I might just skip your article altogether.

  6. Ken Barbalace  Says:

    I try to balance scrolling against multiple page breaks. I personally try to keep the scroll length of my content to a length that is similar to my vertical menus and vertical ads. I look at page breaking as a way to put ads back in front of the user. Since I pay writers by the word, it is important to make sure ads get as much visiblity as possible.

  7. SEO Software  Says:

    Yea sure paging your articles can have great SEO impact as you mentioned and opens the door for better monetization of your articles.

    However i do not recommend it, beacause they are not user friendly for some reasons:

    -People with low internet connection and with slow PCs will take them longer to read the articles. since the load time will be longer.

    -People like to see all in one place to save time.

    -If your good information on the second page, people will never going to see it because they will judge the article from the first page.

    Thanks for the post though
    Mike J.

Leave a Response








(Email field must be filled in)

Top of page...