Just to be clear, Google said this before - Google: Few Strong Pages > Many Weak Ones but here John Mueller explained it a bit more. He said that when you take one big stronger page and split it up into multiple pages might make it harder for Google to figure out the target of those multiple pages.
He said "those smaller pieces themselves might not be that clearly kind of targeted where we can really recognize actually all of the information is here and they can navigate to the rest of the site here."
The messaging from Google since the Panda days has been about less is more, in terms of pages.
John said at 8:32 into the last hangout from Friday:
They're two things probably going on here.On the one hand it’s, you're splitting up one perhaps strong page and take taking that and making four kind of small smaller parts of that. Which on the one hand, that can work but it also means that we to have the full context within each of the individual parts.
So sometimes what happens is like the value of the big longer page is partially because there's so many different aspects on that page that make it useful for a variety of people and it's kind of like one stronger page for kind of a bigger group of a topic.
Whereas if you split it up into smaller pieces then those smaller pieces themselves might not be that clearly kind of targeted where we can really recognize actually all of the information is here and they can navigate to the rest of the site here.
So that that might be something that that might be playing a role there.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
