Ranking wise; Long article or multiple smaller ones?

[Albert Camus]

It's very easy to develop some sort of "magical thinking" when it comes to long-form content.

After all, there are lots of articles saying that the longer your content, the higher the chance that you will rank.

But here's the cold, hard truth: correlation does not equal causation.

The reason why longer pieces of content tend to rank higher has less to do with the length and more to do with the value contained in that content.

Usually, if you really care about the experience of the people finding your pages when they do searches on Google, you're going to pack as much information there as possible.

You're going to try to walk them through the decision-making process or give them as much information so they can make an informed decision or add value to their lives.

Your focus is on them, and this usually means longer content.

But just because you have longer content doesn't automatically mean your rankings will go up.

I hope you know the difference.

Focus on the searcher.

Focus on the experience they walk away with, and you won't have to worry about keyword density or content length and all that good stuff.

The truth is that from the UX perspective a longer article feels bad

The reality is that by the time user has realized the article is too long for his taste, Google would have already cataloged him into a non-bounceback visit, which is positive froma ranking perspective.

And from a thoroughness of a topic and SEO purposes a longer article, generally ranks better because longer articles tend to target a wider spectrum of long-tail keywords.

Personally I'm a great fan of longer articles or skycrapper articles.

The issue: from the motivation perspective, they are extremely harsh. Many of my article writers and even myself, have forfeited multiple projects because they felt really tedious becuase of the neverending writtings.

Presonally I feel much more motivating to write 500 page 1K words articles than 50 page 10K words articles. A 50 page site feels tiny, while a 500 page page feels big, despite both have the same amount of content.

In fact is kind of weird that some of my writers, write faster 10 1K articles than 1 5K article

So each option has some pros and cons. Nowadays I prefer to use the write and merge technique: Write 1K words 500 pages articles, and the ones that don't receive almost any visit, remove the page, do a 301 to another page, and merge the content with that page.

I'm not targeting a certain number of words or looking to make a useless page with 1000's of words for the sake of having long content. I'm not even counting words, checking density or doing any optimization until I'm done writing.

I just take my topic or headline and start the research and writing process with the content value and quality being the main concern. I don't care if it's going to be too long or too short in the time of writing but later I should make a decision; if it's too short I'll add more relevant key points if possible or just leave it as a draft until I have more ideas or doing better research. If it's too long, that's what I was asking here!

After I'm done writing and covering my topic from every given aspect, I start an optmization proofread and mostly I'm just making little edits that doesn't affect the quality and that's it.

The niche I'm in right now is something I'm really passionate about and have extensive knowledge. My only target when writing my first article was to perfectly cover the topic and it just happened that I have 10k+ words on it.

Thinking about the rest of my topics, I already know the topics well and know many will be going to be the same thing with high word count (and most of them could be easily splited into smaller articles while perseving the quality), I was only confused about the best way to publish.

I already decided what I'm going to do for the whole website structure based on the opinions you gave and my prior knowledge of the type of audience I'm targeting;

• 12 pages will be the main ones with 5-10k words for each of them (more or less I only care about covering those topics well)
• 100's of pages will be the next level around the main pages, with each of them having around 2k words
• From 1 to approximately 20 child pages for each one on the second level with roughly 3k words for each
• The word counts here are just rough estimates according to my knowledge of the niche at hand
• Most of the child pages will follow the same writing style and some kind of a template, making the writing process easier.
• I understand that interlinking and generating a proper sitemap would be crucial.
• I will be using content taples, navigation menus and anchor links across the pages to help make it easier for the reader to parse

Something like this maybe;

• Dogs will be the main topic with a page of high word count (informational/quality focused)
• Breeds will be the second level, hundreds of them with average word count (informational/quality focused too)
• I have 10 dogs of each breed, each one will have his own page with all the related info about him/her (seller pages)
• Seperate supporting pages that cover general topics about dogs and breedin (highly SEO focused/shorter than the others while keeping the quality high)

This structure will be good for my niche (quality and organizing wise). It will also be engaging for my targeted readers. Think this is a good plan?

 

[OReStOBL]

Why the cap? Interlinking is good, but the cap isn't needed.

He was just suggesting. You can decide to exceed that limit.

 

[lotsofmoney]

Have a mix of both for multiple benefits. Long articles are good for ranking but small articles help you update the site fast.

 

[Marco69]

Like myself you will not find a solution to fit all problems....
Some say long content is better for seo ranking, others doing the opposite.

A guide or when saas companies promote a new product with cases, screenshots, how to using it...then long content will help you stand out.
But to get target niche leads (buyers-clients) I think they not have the time to reading 3-5000 words pillas rcontent.

Moment one exception: learn from consulting companies, when they showing you "pro-bono" cases how they solved a problem for their clients, then you will get call schedule, or sign up for coaching session I be sure.

 

[seomaster5]

Ling articles are easier to rank. Spammers do not put so much effort so your blog will automatically stand out.

 

[Tobi2mike]

I do not think how long and short an article is is that important, but how rich and informative it is. This is not to say an article should be short but however, the content should be as good as it can be.

 

[Marco69]

Where this idea comes from the last years, that long content will be indexed faster and get higher rankings?

G+ Bing not say a single word in their policies that every high quality content has have minimum length of 1000 words.
They not define exactly what high quality content is.

Content quality score is based on search intend and should match that at best.
Many wrong articles ranking high goday like;

free ai tools....
free cms systems....
whatsoever with "the best free...."

Then in the article is not one if these "best tools" for free, all to buy with luck you find some with a free trial .

For me this is not search intend best match .......or the new google guidelines of content quality but hey, such content ranks high...

 

[gokucrili]

I would suggest randomizing. I personally use a 1:3 ratio (3 short articles and 1 long in-between). All long-form articles does seem like you are trying to hard to rank, might be a trigger for Google's AI Bots.

As you said it yourself, it's not exact science.

do you always put keywords inside your articles?

 

[Marco69]

gokucrill:
thank you for the tip!
Is it based on your experience?

Where does such thoughts come from when this 1:3 ratio is not in the G guidelines?

The same with ratio on how much you should have content curation on your site ..

I plan 4-5 topics all with content curation ,also add my own 200-300 words of it than link to original source ..daily 2 posts on each, other topics I have here write myself/rewrite it, longer articles like visualized cases.

All these articles are informational content. My main site Home only one coaching service
is a commercial landingpage.

i try to separate my landingpage from the other informational blogging topics .

At this point I'm not sure how to separate them .
Having multiple category pages on multiple domains or using subdomains?

Ten interlink them all.
Subdomains make no sense when G count them as one....

 

[Marco69]

When I see big media newspapers like Bloomberg all their sites, no matter if news,lab,cases....they all structured like commercial landingpages......not pure informational sites.

 

[qwe7410]

I suggest do many then refine them when you see results.

Often, you thought you did great in that one good article but they don't fetch much traffics to justify the returns.

 

[joenic50]

I'm going to suggest you to try both. Skyscraper content always ranks better in my experience but you can also try multiple 1000-1500 words articles with internal linking.

This is what I was looking for. Thanks guys!

 

[SpartanHoplite]

Long articles rank better in my experience, i use short articles to link pages internally and keep my internal link map active!

 

[Marco69]

SpartanHoplite;
using subfolders/ or multiple domains : you linking all your single post articles back to the category page (category should rank multiple spots in serps) or do you link all single post articles back to home page? Or doing both...

 

[paisawaisa]

Single article of 10k words is a lot. Will you yourself spend time reading such a post? No one has so much time these days. Max 2000 words is enough for most niches.

 

[gooods1996]

I will write about 1500 words, and then observe the ranking. If there is a good ranking, I will keep extending the content and increase the diversity of keywords

 

[kalpana007]

Long articles will perform better than short articles. But that also has to keep user experience in mind, you are not in a race to make the article as long as possible.

 

[gokucrili]

When I see big media newspapers like Bloomberg all their sites, no matter if news,lab,cases....they all structured like commercial landingpages......not pure informational sites.

but how do you structure a blog as a commercial?

 

[Kamillus]

I would split that into two articles 5k each and not longer, if you have 1-10 do just 1-5 and 5-6 interlink them and focus on shorter articles wich will be in the same cluster do you will link them also from long one.

 

[Marco69]

Hi gokucrili!

exact, this is my question.

In wordpress there are plugins to create/ build your category page or using pages,then insert a list or grid with your posts. This category page should have text,images or link menu- subtopics.

search for category examples in google....

So then setting for index category+ single post and page.
The name of category page ( your keyword) should be in the url, in the single post only the postname permalink., see it on site byrdie. com

The newspapers using different expensive cms not free wordpress, so I think they building this with taxonomy pages.
But I gave no clue how build taxonomy in wp but there are plugins for this .....