Test - one long article vs 10 short articles

Good test, thank you for the info!

You could have done what the majority of people would have done, which is to take it at face value that long articles always work better than short ones in Google's eyes. But you didn't. Congrats on that.

Content is still king!

I can confirm that humans like to read stuff yes.

As for robots, Im only guessing.

It is good to know that. Will try this myself to see if it works or not. I will test it to see if I get more traffic. Thanks.

What are the SERP rankings of each of those sites?

When deciding about the theme of my articles, I always follow general "make it natural" rule. That is why some articles are 300 words long, whereas others have more than 1000 words. I think it's suspicious to Google if all your articles have exactly 1000 words (+-50).

I have tried it and longer with unique and real content wins.

How refreshing to find someone who thinks of an approach and then tests it for themselves. The norm now seem to be to come and here and ask for someone else to tell the asker what will happen and (surprise) getting dozens of posts from random members posting one liners talking about what they "think" will happen/ what they've "heard" will happen, etc.

Thank you for partially restoring my faith in WF members - which is dwindling rapidly at the moment.

And we have a winner! Content is still king of the search engines - however thanks for doing the test - it puts things in better perspective.

What about providing useful and valuable information for the reader?

Are you "feeding" them what they're looking for or just comparing lengthy text against shorter text?

It's an interesting experiment but there's definitely more to it then that alone...

Putting an idea or a concept into a test is the best way to determine if it works for you or not. Regardless whether the content is long or short, it's not the length that actually attracts readers but the quality of content. By being repetitive or wordy alone, one can write a 1000-word article. However, that 1000-word article will surely receive comments that the writer just tackled the same things over and over again. It's with the quality and not with the length of the content.

I hope it works in the long run. However, I still suggest that you should update it when you have time or treat it like a blog.

Regards,

Ronnie

Nice Validation of long running SEO assumption. More content = more authority. I always push 700+ words per article as the golden rule.

Thanks for sharing this. Although I think always tailoring the article to the reader is the best way to go as mentioned above.

If for example you are writing a piece about the 5 best keyboard shortcuts on MSword, people may not want to have 1000 words + they just want the facts plain and simple.

So I think the rule is write longer pieces only if the subject matter can sustain it. Otherwise you're actively going against the natural grain to get more natural traffic.

I have seen the same on my sites. Thanks for validating.

Very interesting test. Thanks for sharing! I'll have to put your results to work on my own stuff.

I prefer reading short articles most of the time. Mostly because the long articles don't give me much content. Every once in awhile I find a long article that is readable, though. I've always assumed that's what other people liked as well, but the general consensus and results like yours have proven otherwise.

Great work on the test. It's always good to have numbers to back up the general opinion.

Interesting, I have done hundreds of experiments on this same topic - 1200 word articles vs 500 word articles. In many cases, it was the 450-500 word articles that drove the most traffic. Some of those 450-500 word articles ranked on the first page of google and in the top 3 spots using only one word in the search query (verified by seocentro keyword rank tool). Also, that was without having backlinks pointing at the pages.

This is not to say I have not done well with 1200 word articles. Personally, I think its mostly about sentence structure, headings if needed, word choice and a title that precisely states what the page is about.

Most importantly, I always feel its best to just take one very specific subject and break that subject down into several very specific categories. This increases your odds of getting on the first page of Google with the least amount of words needed in the search query.

If your targeting a very broad subject than likely the complexity will require 1200 words or so.

nice share, but lets not make every little post on the blog a novel.

Here is interesting alternative to writing a super long article. It pertains to more of an advanced style of article writing.

Example:

Article number one is an introduction with about 400 words. Below the introduction I included an index of links leading to the corresponding sub-articles. Then at the bottom of each corresponding article I use the exact title of article number one to link back to that first page.

Using this technique I sometimes dominate the entire page of a Google search query. For instance, my website may show ten times on the same page or sometimes just 5 or six times. Or maybe it shows 5 times on the first page and 5 times on the second page.

Ive used this technique for posting VERY long research articles on one of my websites.

Trying the same on some of my sites.. Hoping to get positive results..

I believe an article should be about 750 to 1000 words on one page by itself. I get better rankings by doing this. I did not read through these posts because when I saw your thread I have already a firm belief in what works BEST for ME. Yes for me.

I try to stay close to 1,000 words and never dip below 750 or over 1250. I go for a keyword density of about 2.5 percent, although I can not find where that is proven but I still do it.

I use about three keywords or phrases per article. I use folders to give my web name keyword rich.

That is what I do and has seemed to work the best for me.

Yes you are right , 1000 words article perform better then 500 words article.