Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
-
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice.We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination.
On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text.
Here's my question:
1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles?
Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context.What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter?2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles.
3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page?
Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much!Jim
-
Guys, thanks.
-
Just to weigh in, I would agree with Jeff in that 1 long page is much better from both a usability and SEO standpoint.
In my view, multiple pages should only exist if it is in the context of a hub page. For example, consider a page that is for slow cooker recipes. Instead of having hundreds of recipes on 1 page, it would make sense to have a sub-page for each recipe. Eg:
- Example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/
- example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/lamb-stew
- example.com/slow-cooker-recipes/chicken-casserole
Check out the site architecture section on the following link for a good explanation:
http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank
Best of luck!
-Oli
-
Jim-
I'm not a big fan of articles that are broken up onto many pages.
The thinking in the past has been:
- Break up the pages, and you get more page views. (Great if you are serving advertising.)
- The page will (possibly) load more quickly because you have less content on each page.
- Many marketing agencies want everything above the fold, so shorter pages "look better."
The reality, I think:
- Users hate having to go to the bottom of a page, then to click on the "more" option, and then wait 3-6 seconds for the page to load. Especially on a mobile device.
- It is more complex to have duplicate page titles. I'd recommend the rel=next / rel=previous tags, that could help in this case.
My $0.02 is that you should go with the single, long page articles. I have found that search engines love, love, love pages that have a lot of content (as long as it's well written). A page with 12,000 words of content will often outrank something with 250 words of marketing fluff.
If in doubt, though, test it out, and convert one or two over and test out how they're ranked.
Thanks!
- Jeff
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Certain PHP Pages Not Showing In SERPs
Hi all, You've all been so helpful so far, I'm hoping you can help me with our trickiest SEO question yet. Last year we migrated 7 sites into one, going from flat html to Joomla. This went fine and although we saw a slight drop in traffic, it wasn't too bad. Now however traffic has started to drop and we've been able to hone it down into a certain area of our website. Each of the 7 sites had their own page with some php code that was fed products. These products were updated everyday and were are second most popular page on the sites aprt from the home page. These pages were found in Google no problem and were an essential resource for our site. What we have found is these pages cannot be found at all, unless you type the full business name and product. If you just type the product and the location our customer is based in, we're no where, using the Moz tools it says we're not in the top 50 results. This is a bit of a shock since we used to be at least on the first page, usually quite high up. I'm a little stumped as SEO wise these pages are technically better. They offer the same functionality but in a much more SEO friendly way. I've asked our developer to check: Nothing is being blocked in robots.txt
Web Design | | HB17
The pages are being indexed
There's no strange code errors Essentially the pages can't be found even if we type the full title, for example 'customer's products in their town' to be found we have to type 'customer's products in their town and their full business name'. The top third of the page is just html text, the bottom like I mentioned is PHP and is fed data from a database which is refreshed each morning. I know our developer did some rel conical work but has assured me that's all working fine. While I know it's a new website, we've owned the domain for a while so our domain authority isn't brand new and 0, we also have pages with worse page authority that show up on page 1 no problem, so I'm leaning towards something else might not be right. Can anyone help me figure out why these pages are being indexed but not even found? Thanks!0 -
Too Many Outbound Links on the Home Page - Bad for SEO?
Hello Again Moz community, This is my last Q of the day: I have a LOT of outbound links on the home page of www.web3.ca Some are to clients projects, most are to other pages on the website. Can reducing this to the core pages have a positive impact on SEO? Thanks, Anton
Web Design | | Web3Marketing870 -
What Is The Best Way To Categorize 3 Different Top Level Categories Each With 20 Sub Categories
Hello, We are trying to figure out the best way to categorize our app review website. We have 3 platforms, iPhone, iPad and Android and each platform has several sub categories and numerous apps subcategories totaling around 50 to 60 categories for each platform. Any suggestions how to do this properly? thank you Mike
Web Design | | crazymikesapps10 -
Does stock art photo attribution negatively impact SEO by leaking Google Page Rank?
Greetings: Companies such as Shutterstock often require that buyers place credit attribution on their web pages when photos you buy from them appear on these pages.. Shutterstock requests that credit attribution links such as these be added: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com Do these links negatively impact SEO? Or do search engines view them as a positive? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Question #1: Does Google index https:// pages? I thought they didn't because....
generally the difference between https:// and http:// is that the s (stands for secure I think) is usually reserved for payment pages, and other similar types of pages that search engines aren't supposed to index. (like any page where private data is stored) My site that all of my questions are revolving around is built with Volusion (i'm used to wordpress) and I keep finding problems like this one. The site was hardcoded to have all MENU internal links (which was 90% of our internal links) lead to **https://**www.example.com/example-page/ instead of **http://**www.example.com/example-page/ To double check that this was causing a loss in Link Juice. I jumped over to OSE. Sure enough, the internal links were not being indexed, only the links that were manually created and set to NOT include the httpS:// were being indexed. So if OSE wasn't counting the links, and based on the general ideology behind secure http access, that would infer that no link juice is being passed... Right?? Thanks for your time. Screens are available if necessary, but the OSE has already been updated since then and the new internal links ARE STILL NOT being indexed. The problem is.. is this a volusion problem? Should I switch to Wordpress? here's the site URL (please excuse the design, it's pretty ugly considering how basic volusion is compared to wordpress) http://www.uncommonthread.com/
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
After a website redesign, what is the impact and is it a good practice to use /v2/ naming convention?
Hi mightyful SEOMoz community. We just launched a redesign of our commercial website from https://www.data-field.com to https://www.data-field.com/v2/ All URLs from previous website were 301 permanent redirect to the appropriate page in the new website, and the root domains ( /, /v2/ ) send the users to their own language content /v2/en/, /v2/fr/, /v2/zh/ Up to here everything is fine. But then I setup the usual "Share" buttons, only to find that they were displaying a "0" count. Then I realized that it was because of the root URL change from / to /v2/ My question is the following: 1. Is using /v2/ a good practice? 2. If yes, then should I link the Social tool to https://www.data-field.com/ ( only ) instead of linking it to the actual page in the address bar? Thanks for your answers.
Web Design | | NicolasE0 -
What are some of the best Word Press themes for SEO?
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best wordpress themes to use? Here is one that has been recommended to me before: http://www.smallbiztheme.com/
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Order of my products on page?
Hi, I read somewhere that Google reads a page in a certain way. All my product pages are listed (or most of them) in Alphabetical order. Now say I am targeting brands named Cruyff and Money Clothing, should I put all the Cruyff and Money products above everything else? See here for example... http://www.designerboutique-online.com/jackets/ They are in Alph order, except the sales items at the bottom. So would it be beneficial to do this? To put my targeted brands at the top of the page? And if not, is there anything I should be doing with the layout of the products to improve/help with SEO? Thanks Will
Web Design | | WillBlackburn0