Why Do Split-Up Articles Rank Well?

Ask Yukon, he is the onpage expert with these type of things.

I'm totally with you about the annoyement of it.

Personally I don't think it's a wise thing to do when you have a small site as Google could easily flag you as thin when you do it all the time. Making it a part of the site, why not, you can interlink the pages to create more authority on the subject.

I think it also has to do with the additional stuff on the page, often those authority sites have related posts with images below the list and perhaps comments or whatever user interaction, a sidebar where you wonder does this thing ever end, tons of navigation below the header with drop downs and what not, footers full of links to everywhere, sometimes I think why sites still have categories when they use their footer as such.

All that makes it less thin I think and that's why authority sites can get away with it more easy then a 5 page blog that adds 10 pages in such way and that only has an Adsense ad and some recent posts in the sidebar and a contact / privacy / about / disclaimer page in the footer, like you see most of the time. Anyway, what I say ain't proof, just my observations of sites that got penalized sooner or later.

If you feed in to user metrics being important, this is a good way to game user metrics. It will increase your pageviews through the roof.

Personally, i think they do it for advertising. Each click is another page load, another impression, another load of banners they can serve = more money.

Also, those sites you mentioned are bulletproof, the usual rules dont apply to them.

Breaking up content works well in the SERPs because it creates multiple pages focused on one subject & is all connected with relevant internal links.

OP you might find your examples irritating but look at it like this. If multiple traffic is searching for different keywords/phrases but all those different keywords/phrases are on the same subject, why should they have to read a 1,000 word article to get a small bit of detailed info. that they're looking for?

Example, say this is one article is broken up into 10 smaller sub-articles/pages, the article is about hurricanes:

• How Hurricanes Work (Category page)
  • Introduction to How Hurricanes Work (supporting page)
  • Defining a Hurricane (supporting page)
  • How a Hurricane Forms (supporting page)
  • Lifecycle of a Hurricane (supporting page)
  • Hurricane Categories (supporting page)
  • Hurricane Damages (supporting page)
  • Tracking a Hurricane (supporting page)
  • Hurricane Names (supporting page)
  • Hurricane History (supporting page)

The traffic on Google searching for who names hurricanes doesn't want to wade through the other sub-topics, they're searching for the origin of hurricane names (example).

Now add internal links on all these very focused pages pointing back to the main page (ex: How Hurricanes Work (Category page)) & it creates a series of same subject pages that are a heck of a lot stronger than a single page article.

It doesn't matter how large the site is, the example above could be the entire site (10 pages) though I would step up the game & repeat the whole process with multiple storm types/categories (blizzards, floods, tornadoes, etc...) & have a target keyword for the index page as weather (root keyword for the entire site).

Also, it doesn't really matter how much text is on the individual pages in the article series, unless your trying to rank a Google In-depth article or trying to pick up additional longtail keywords (per page).

I always preach silos around here because it helps rank pages & makes it easier to rank multiple pages from the same domain for the exact same keyword. If position #1 in Google SERPs has traffic, so does positions #2 & #3.

Yeah thats not what hes talking about Yukon.

These sites create pages like... "Top 10 places to live in the world"... then it has a page for each city/country and about 150 words and an image.

They do it purely for increased ad exposure and pageviews.

Big sites have content, they have ways of showing content as related posts, link in content etc.

If you have a mini site of 20 pages then it is difficult to even show related posts at the bottom of your post.

So what you can do is write content, let it look authoritative then you can do this this.