Long form pages

The gospel used to be that you should offer your content spread out over several pages. This would encourage people to click from one page to the next and show greater "engagement" by doing so. It would also give you options for targeting more keyword phrases as you had more pages to work with.

Now i frequently se all the content postes on one long page and recently Toms Hardware changed their layout to such a format with only one or two pages per test or article.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/sandisk-extreme-500-ssd,review-33559.html

I would think that they know what they are doing, so what is behind this? What are the benefits from this and how do you make up for the loss of the flexibilty of the multipage design?

The theory is that the google quality guidelines demand that all the content be on the page to get the "Page Fully meets" status in terms of satisfying the needs of the keyword search. Achieving that status is supposed to help you rank better and achieve more authority in your keyword space.

I don't think it has been proven yet.

I create long pages to target specific keywords and kw buckets. Long form is good to prove your expertise and trustworthiness to the search engine.

Don't try to create one long form page to target all of your keywords. It is still correct to have separate pages for different products and service. If those individual product/service pages are long form (high authority) they should perform well for those specific targets against pages that aren't as robust.

Long ass pages are a DESIGN FAD that I feel will eventually go away. I personally hate them, no user loves to scroll 10 miles to view something that they should have been able to access from a simple click. From an SEO perspective guys might do it to fit more content and keywords on a page while staying graphical... but I hate it. Lets not forget that Google has a "top of page" bias. What is at the top of a page is thought to carry more weight.... so what would be thought of something 50 feet down? Think about that.