About a month ago, I wrote on a topic that was well received by the SEO industry. The topic was named Google Responds To Detailed Questions On Pagination SEO Issues. It really is one of those outstanding old-school SEO discussions that get down and dirty into the details of URL structure and navigation when focusing on best-practices for users and keeping search engines happy.
This weekend, Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator, posted an outstanding related topic at WebmasterWorld. In short, Tedster shares his experience and what works for splitting up paginated articles. He has tried many techniques on large publisher web sites and documented what he believes simply works.
Tedster explains:
The value of "long-form journalism" has been tested on websites such as Salon and shown to be quite viable. It also attracts a better caliber of writer. With this in mind, over a year ago I was working with an online magazine that was already publishing longer, in-depth articles, in the area of many thousands of words.The SEO challenge we had was that page 2 and beyond for most articles were not getting any search traffic - even though there was plenty of awesome content there. The approach we decided on is labor intensive for the content creators. But after some education, the writers were all interested in trying to increase the audience size.
He then lists the several steps he took to make a large publishing site realize a 70% up-tick in search referrals. I won't list them here, I would suggest you read the WebmasterWorld. He is also answering specific questions that he may have left out from his step by step outline.
This is one of those outstanding SEO threads.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
