Content Publishing in vBulletin

Unlike most vBulletin site owners, I do not monetize my site by selling advertising space... in fact, I don't monetize very well at all. I'm on a path to change that; hoping that I can do so without pissing of my vocal membership.

My site (Autopia.org) is a community for people who love keeping their cars looking great (detailing). Since I started the site in 1999, several others have popped up, so I now have some competition that is trying to eat my lunch.

When I started Autopia.org it was a content site. I'm a writer, so I wrote a bunch of articles. At one point in the past, I took all of my articles off of a CMS system on my site and created an ebook. This helped me build a huge mailing list, but I lost all of the rich content that Google and Yahoo! love so much. I have decided to put the content back into my Autopia.org website using The VB Geek's GARs system, and that leads me to ask for some help and feedback.

My book content is about 350 printed pages, packed into 24 chapters. For human readability, it will be best if I break each chapter into sections, with navigation to each section along side the article content. Inside the GARs system each section would generate a new URL. Is this going to result in better or worse ranking with the search engines?

TIA,
David

Breaking the document into sections could have some advantages. It creates a higher # of unique pages. Each section has its own more prominent / relevant keywords. This *could* help each section pull more traffic combined than individually. It really depends on the nature of the documents themselves and the size of the sections. If you are willing, you might consider testing it, by having 1/2 of your articles posted in full, and 1/2 in sections to see which is more favorable to the engines. Keep descriptive anchor text in all of your section-to-section links.

Joe,

That's good feeback. I have a number of the chapters published in my store as a single page of text. 9-10 of these articles get top 1-5 ranking in Google and Yahoo on search terms that result in millions of pages, so I do have experience in how well the content performs as a single page. I was hoping to get a definate "YES" answer on multiple sections vs. one large page, because it would give more opportunities for pages indexed as well as readability for my visitors.

Thanks,
David