Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...

[jmueller0823]

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 3

Is 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

[customerparadigm.com]

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

[Oli-Sherry]

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

[jmueller0823]

Guys, thanks.