Splitting Long Articles - a good idea?

Do you think it is a good idea splitting long articles into pages? For example, a five paragraph article would be split into five pages.

This will trigger more page and ad unit impressions, which could have an effect on CTR, but might also induce more clicks if the ads are well targeted.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

 

You have to view this from your visitors standpoint. If an article is very long then it should be a good idea to split it up into two or three pages. However I don't think its a good idea to have something with a "paragraph a page" or pages with less than 100 words on them.

 

i just see it as this, if the text takes up a whole 1280x1024 screen (so exclude the header and footer and all), then split it up.

 

Yes, it depend on your user. You just have to try and make it more readable. I have seen sites with pages that go on forever and I have seen others which break up pages to small readable chunks. The only problem with splitting up pages is that your users from search engines can constantly lend on the 2nd, 3rd,4th pages rather than the first page.

 

yes ,surely its good just put one page after another ,so easy for loading and also reading

 

You definitely have to find a balance. Normally you pages should not require the visitor to scroll down more than twice. If it's longer than that you should add a second page. However you need to be careful not to put too many pages. I find that dividing an article into 3-5 pages is best. Anything more than 5 pages and you have a large chance that visitors will simply not click through the whole thing.

 

I personally believe splitting articles onto several pages is a BIG MISTAKE.

I think it gives a very primitive feel for your website. Text is not at all difficult to load, even for the largest articles.

I think it annoys the user and draws them away. Odds are, they're be hitting the "back" button before the "next page" button 90% of the time.

 

It is like this, the more people have to click the less they want.
From my experience when article is splited in four i almost always read only first two and then give up. Too much clicking.

 

I agree, Crusader, that splitting an article into logical breaks might be good, but I thought about what possible implications this could have on CTR.

Say for eg if you have a visitor that will likely not click on any ads. Then you take most of the longer articles on your site, and split them, say, into 4 parts. You could be increasing your overall page impressions up to 400%.

That visitor who is not likely to click is now looking at 4 times the ad unit impressions. So, could it be that this could drag down your overall earnings, by dragging down eCPM?

 

I agree that it is a big mistake to split an article. Every time I have been at one of those online magazine sites like forbes dot com or new york times dot com and then I have to click through 4 separate sections AND ads just to finish reading the whole article it is a pain in the ass.

This is true for any type of content. I always prefer all the content to be displayed all at once ! It makes for a much better surfing experience!@

 

Primitive feel? And pressing the page down button 10 times on this toilet paper page isn't?

Another toilet paper fan...

 

The simple answer is not to base your decision on CTR but on user experience. Put yourself in the position of the reader.

Will you want to wade through 10,000 words on one screen? Probably not.

Will you want to wade through 10 pages to read one article? Probably not.

Will you recognise that the article is split purely to display more ads? Probably.

Look at what you're writing. Does it need to be that long? If so then split but recognise that you're selling something in every single segment and that is the desire to click on 'next' rather than 'back' so structure the segment accordingly.

 

If you split the long article into more parts remember that you need to somehow make the subsequent pages not fight with the first one for the google ranking.

 

If you're looking at it from purely a quality of adsense ads/quantity of adsense clicks standpoint, I can't see how splitting would help. Better off just putting ad's throughout the article. Say, beginning, middle and end, or running down the side skyscraper style.

Ask yourself, what would make a user click an ad on the third page, that wouldn't click one on the first?

 

If you want to, though, you could use _GET vars to work it all out.

Have www. url. com/ whatever.php be the whole article, for search engines.

Have www. url. com/ whatevershortened.php?page=1 be the link from your main site, with a robots.txt saying not to crawl it.

 

Boredom? Not getting the info they wanted? An exit?

 

Well then just write a crappy article, with no information, about a boring subject and disable the back button.

 

You can have a great article but it might not be exactly what the reader is looking for or not have all the details they want. When that happens, they may want to look elsewhere.

 

but how about search engine witch will be better for website ranking ??.
i have some article with 3000 to 4000 words in the same page the article sweem to rank well for its keywords will spliting it into 3 or 4 page give him better or wrose ranking?

 

Front past and present experiences with formatting articles for the web, I would not break them into seperate pages.

-You are likely to lose your user before the end of the article.
-You will frustrate your user
-It's not worth the extra effort when you have to go back and convert all those multi-page articles into one page.

My $0.02 HTH,