Is a huge mainpage good?

[ninjashoes]

The more words and sentences on a page then the more possiblities of people finding search phrases on your highest pr page right?

If you have a page that you gotta spend 20 minutes scrolling to get to the bottom is there a penalty? Do you run the risk over having too many keywords?

[Avinash]

I don't see any type of penalty in such pages... but 20 minutes in scrolling? Who will create such web pages, man?

[webzenstar]

I'm a fan of reasonably short pages featuring (hopefully) interesting themes.

Visitors looking for a specific information are better served when they -immediately- find "the object of their desire", IMHO ; )

[SaltLampKing]

It seems like you would definately raise some red flags if you put in too many keywords into one page. It needs to have a good keyword ratio / non keywords.

[Webfu]

I've always enjoyed long web pages. To me it looks good sometimes if the content fits in with the look and feel the right way. Long meaning around 4000 pixels tall.

[Thomas Schulz]

For reading books online etc. it is great. However, for search engines it is AFAIK a no no to create pages above 100k in content. You may consider offering both a printable (long version) and multiple pages pages. Another thing o consider is e.g. placement of Adsense ads and alike.

[solidghost]

Won't it be better for seo if you have a constantly updated main page instead?

A lot of content is good but it is going to be difficult to optimize for certain keywords if all your content is on one page.

[RobS]

You need to clarify EXACTLY what the AIM of the homepage is.

What is your purpose?
What do you want the readers to find?

WHY will they come to your site?
What will they be looking for?
Rob

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by ninjashoes

Do you run the risk over having too many keywords?

Yes this is a risk you have to balance out when using keywords more than usual on a long web page. You can get penalized for using to many keywords on any one page.

[hhheng]

There is no penalty to you from SEs, but visitors don't like it. The first 5 seconds visitors spend on your page is very important, and you need to show them what they want in this short time.

[martyan]

I don't think it's worth doing, first of all, don't make your visitors uncomfortable, then if you think you can increase the key-word density, I seriously doubt it, as it's the proportion, not the number of words, which matters, so if you increase the number of key words words on the page, but the total number of words on the page also increases, you'll gain nothing.n The speed of download of the main page is also taken into account by SE.

[Webnauts]

I found and interesting article affiliated to this topic at Sitepoint. Here is the conclusion for the big three:

"Thus, this experiment established the fact that the leading search engines differ considerably in terms of the the amount of page text they're able to crawl. For Yahoo!, the limit is 210KB; for Google, 520KB; and for MSN, it's 1030KB. Pages smaller than these sizes are indexed fully, while any text that extends beyond those limits will not be indexed".

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/print/index...here-bots-stop

[Thomas Schulz]

What about SEs "willingness" to refresh content? I would think low PR pages being huge in size would get checked less often perhaps.

[Charleston]

The more related content the better!

[solidghost]

Does Google or the other search engine index the CSS as well?
Should I put my CSS in another file?

[Sideways]

I would use an external css. Makes for faster updating and page download time.

[Webnauts]

The point is that successful SEO is designing for humans and not engines.
And for humans too long pages are not good. Think about usability.

[ninjashoes]

Ok guys as many of you might know already I run a mixed martial arts forum. Theres alot of different topics that my forum covers from politics to to some things that are flat out bizzare. I use vbulletin and my main page uses a portal system which pulls threads from the MMA forum(the biggest one and the most relevent for my visitors) and displays them on the front page.

I used to not have any threads on my front page because I thought it was ugly. One day though I realized if theres not very much "MMA" related content on my front page which has the highest pagerank then I don't have very many key phrases that people might pull up when searching for MMA related news and so forth. At that point I realized that I could pull threads from my MMA forum and have fresh MMA related news for people to find on my highest pr page. I first started with about 5 threads on the main page and noticed a slight improvement. I then got really greedy and bumped it to 50 threads and noticed my traffic from google increase about 500%.

My main page is only about 50kb even though I added alot more content and it takes a long time to scroll to the bottom. I still have the navigation and a short keyword intense intro at the top so essentially the page is the same for first time visitors. I have so far thus concluded that the more content you have on your highest pr page then the more targeted traffic you will get so long as the content is relevent to the topic of your site.

I have just now increased the amount of threads to 90 and the page is still under 60kb so we will soon see if there is further improvement. I still have not concluded whether or not it has given me any penalties for overabundance of keywords so dont start making your main pages superlong because of my experiment I would instead suggest doing your own gradual experimentation like I have.

[bermuda]

As some webmasters say, the 100k may be the limit to a search engine friendly web page, but the smaller in size, the better chances for search engines fully taking a snapshot of your web pages.

[NothingButNet]

People always have the option not to scroll.

I have one gigantic site and while I could make a massive front page, I prefer to have snippets of the information on there for people to click through to other, more specifically targetted pages.