Long Pages Or Short?, Finaly an answer! Options

[rmccarley]

Since you guys dragged me into this debate here are the results of my testing.

Enjoy!

[ukdaz]

Hi

Yeah I've always gone for creating long articles over splitting them up into shorter sections across multiple - though I think its a fine balance of writing an article well enough to keep the interest of your reader and not too long it bores them.

I got told elsewhere my website pages are TLDR (too long didn't read) - I've reduced them slightly in length without too much cause for concern.

Daz

[sebastienbillard]

Interesting. Some times ago I made a serie of articles commenting the Accessiweb guidelines (a french equivalent to WCAG). I noticed the 1st part was bookmarked more than the 2cd one in Delicious, and the 2cd one more than the 3rd

For me, long (full) articles are the rule, multipart is the exception, when the amount of text affects usability.

[JohnMu]

Nice article, Rand!

In addition, fewer, larger objects in your pages are better for your page load time

John

[bwelford]

That's a good article, Rand, with food for thought for many.

You can write 'articles' as a series of blog posts. This then presents your content in a variety of ways. The normal blog flow gives you the 'long article'. The individual posts are the sections. If you've also tagged the posts then you get them appearing within the tag pages as well. Sounds like win/win to me.

[rmccarley]

Barry that's what I thought but am finding it is best to have one difinitive resource that gets support from the blog. But if you took several posts, refined them and made an 'authoratative' article from that...

[tinkerbellchime]

I like to read pages that have a lot of text. By that I mean about 3 screenfulls (sp?). How many screenfulls are about right? I don't mind scrolling down. I just don't like scrolling right and left. I agree that Google likes longer pages and websites that stick to a theme. Maybe it's their way of encouraging better content. I visited Barry's site today. It's just right. Plenty of text with great content, but not tiring. Everything is well sectioned.

Christina

[send2paul]

Maybe it's their way of encouraging better content

- and that really is the way to go, in my opinion. I think the only danger in page length is them being too long. It's all about content.

As will often be heard echoing around the internet in terms of website copy - "(Good) Content is king" - after that, the layout/splitting of webpage text will follow with practice.

Paul

p.s. I don't like long pages, I have a low attention factor - I'd rather click on something on go read another short page

[Wit]

Hmmm, maybe long articles ARE better, but because I'm foreign, I can't be arsed to read the lot. I'm just too slow and rarely read them from beginning to end.

However, if the articles in question APPEAR interesting enough, I find myself bookmarking some of them from time to time. So I can read them when I'm bored.

Also, if I ever wanted to link to a SEO article, I'd rather link to a single page with all the answers on it than to a series of pages leading a person further and further from my site.

So YES, I think that long, comprehensive, all-in-one articles get more links than short or fragmented ones. Especially so if you mainly target English "native speakers"...

[bwelford]

Thanks for the kind words, Christina.

I must admit my series of newsletters started way before blogs were ever around. I really think blogs are better but some people prefer to read longer articles so I continue to write articles every month or so.

For both blog posts and newsletters I need to have some topic that is likely to be on people's radar screens. The topics seem to naturally split into items that justify a newsletter length and others that can be covered in a blog post. I just checked and the most recent newsletter is 2,700 words, which is slightly more than the average. This is all in one long scrolling web page. A slightly longer than average recent blog post was 600 words.

This is all of course a matter of personal choice but this works for me.

[UsmcDude]

I am trying an experiment with a page on my site. On the page (about 1/3 down the page) I added intros to other related articles to increase page length in order to add more content and keywords. In light of the thread discussion, I would be interested in what viewers think:

http://www.joelane.com/kennewick-real-estate.php

The page is optimized for 'kennewick real estate' or 'kennewick wa real estate'

[send2paul]

Hmmm, maybe long articles ARE better, but because I'm foreign, I can't be arsed to read the lot.

To quote my Cre8asite colleague Wit from earlier in this thread

I would have to agree with Wit, here, about your page length. In my opinion, it's way tooooooooooo long. I guess you could re-write the copy on a smaller page to maintain SERPS, and then have separate pages for the other subsection topics which could be equally optimized for their main subject areas?

Paul

[bwelford]

That page has about 3,500 words in the text part of it, UsmcDude. As Wit and Paul said, it's far too long. You can do an adequate job of making it relevant for a particular keyword phrase with only a fraction of that content.

[EGOL]

I was travelling when this was first posted so I am glad that the thread is active again.

I am not convinced by the information presented that long articles are better. The only way to know for sure is to post the long article and the series of short articles and see which gets more traffic, or conversions or whatever your measure of success might be. An A/B test with analytics study is needed to be convincing.

I recently posted three long articles on my site to see how much traffic they pulled from the search engines, how long visitors stayed on the, and how much adsense they earned. Then I broke them into multiple smaller articles that were linked to together with a common anchor text menu that is posted on every page of the article.

Lots of analytics were run on these. Pre-post traffic, visitor time on site, adsense earnings. These were 2000 to 4000 word articles then broken into multiple 500-1000 word articles with clear and persistent anchor text navigation to individual pages. The result was the multiple-page articles outperformed the long single pages on all metrics applied (visitor time on site, adsense income, pre/post traffic).

Not tested with these articles was linkabilty, but my gut feeling is that it would not suffer. Will this work for every article? Probably not because my guess is that keyword factors combined optimization opportunities and ad targeting/placement could vary widly from one article to the next.

[Respree]

I am not convinced by the information presented that long articles are better. The only way to know for sure is to post the long article and the series of short articles and see which gets more traffic, or conversions or whatever your measure of success might be. An A/B test with analytics study is needed to be convincing.

No debate here on whether traffic is valuable, but I think its only part of the equation of reaching the eventual goal of the page, whatever that may be. While it's quite possible that while a long page may be effective in attracting traffic, the visitor 'might' be overwhelmed with the amount of information on the page and quickly click-off, ergo, never accomplishing the ultimate goal (conversions, ad clicks, click on navigation to other important areas, et cetera).

My point is that one needs to also consider other metrics as well and not be potentially misled that a page is successful solely on the basis that it can attract traffic.

That said, and all other things being equal, of course, more traffic is better than less traffic <sorry, I had to end with stating the obvious>.

This post has been edited by Respree: Feb 26 2007, 05:18 PM

[yannis]

My own experience is that longer pages do better with both the search engines as well as users. After a certain page length though users start looking for pages that are in pdf format so that they can download them and read them afterwards.

I consider the ultimate 'mother' of all single web pages Hakom's phd thesis!

On one of my websites I have a fair amount of .pdf files. Some of them are quite long. It took almost a year for Google to have them fully indexed and are now attracting considerable traffic.


Yannis

[Ron Carnell]

Not tested with these articles was linkabilty ...

The other thing not tested, Egol, because obviously you couldn't, was audience.

Hand a copy of "War and Peace" to a six-year-old and the best you can hope is that she'll use it to stand on so she can reach the cookie jar. Hand a copy of "See Jane Run" to a busy businessman and he'll likely hand it right back. I don't think that means Tolstoy's epic novel is too long, nor do I think it necessarily means a school primer is too short. It simply means that different people have different needs and desires.

Internet visitors are not homogenous. I really don't think our content should be, either.

[Arnvid]

Good point Ron, and in addition the old phrase "the internet change while you sleep", is still valid. Yes, personally I have a tendency to write long articles - often around 1200 words. Still they floats around, and a television producer just came to me with some work the other day because he had found some of them.

That said, I believe we must create whatever we do between what is "supposed to be ideal", and whatever "our personality would like to do". That's why webdesign differs, why information architecture differs, and why the length of articles differs. So yes Rand, I love your conclusion - and at the same time I'm happy finding short articles (as long as they are good), and I believe search engines have search spider coders who have different preferences as well (and even if something can be a more total rule today, tomorrow can soon be a different day - LOL).

[DianeV]

As well, I think we ought to take into consideration the question "how long is long?" as well as what the page is about.

[kulpreet_singh]

Most people skim articles rather than read them thoroughly on the first run. For longer articles, the idea is that with a combination of effective copywriting, appropriate imagery or charts, headings, paragraph separation, and proper styling, people will skim the article and see value in it, and leave the tab open or bookmark it. They will then come back to it, give it more attention, read it, take action, maybe link back to the article etc. In addition, longer articles have more to offer to a diverse audience. That is not to say that you run the A-Z on every topic in each article, but your use of effective headers and text separation can improve the user's perception of value in your article.

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This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Mar 27 2007, 05:46 PM