What is better a long article or several short ones?

[StormGirl]

Question: If I am writing an article about food, what is more convenient when it comes to ranking on Google?

Write a long article of 5,000 or 6,000 words (example: Types of Cheese as the H1 title, and then H2 titles such as Fontina, Mozzarella, Parmesan, etc.)
OR
Write small articles of 500-600 words each whose title is Fontina Cheese, Mozzarella Cheese, Parmesan Cheese, etc.

Pros and cons of each approach?
TIA

 

[secretagentdad]

One long article with more attention paid to editing and accessibility over a bunch of small articles all day every day.

I know you can boil it down into minutia and cite google guidelines or what ever.
I've personally seen far better returns on one big article style sites so much so I question the experience or motivations of anyone advocating for short ones.
Pros in my experience have been overwhelming, more traffic and better engagement.
Only con is it can be a bit awkward trying to speak to multiple audiences and you can't blatantly pad rpms as easily.

 

[wikibum]

One long article with more attention paid to editing and accessibility over a bunch of small articles all day every day.

I concur.

It really depends on the keyword you want to go after, but generally, longer more in-depth articles are better than shorter one. Google is looking for "helpful content", so as long as the content adds value to the user (and contains all necessary information about a specific subject) then you should be good.

 

[Ryuzaki]

What is better a long article or several short ones?

Neither is better. What is best is exactly what deals with the intent of the search query with only as much breadth and depth as is required to provide the answer and support for the answer.

Do you want to rank for the query "types of cheese"? Then include all the cheese. Do you want to rank for each individual type of cheese? Then they need to be individual articles.

 

[thisishatred]

Why not both?

The above screams: "Make a silo" - "/types-of-cheese/fontina/" - "/types-of-chesse/goat/"
etc.

You could do a huge article on the different types of cheese, then create larger articles that go way more into depth about those specific types of cheeses.

That way you funnel relevancy all over the cheese silo. You also increase your changes of potentially gaining a new link somewhere in the funnel as apposed to a singular opportunity with the "types of cheese article."

You also have to think of intent and what Google wants.

Types of cheese is the header but what are the chances that same page is going to rank for "what is fontina cheese?" I'd wager probably slim to none.

From what I've seen, Google is getting far more granular in terms of queries - i.e.. they want an exact answer to every single person that poses a question.

 

[bmoney]

one big covering the cheese topic in general mentioning those, and small ones specifically targeted to types of cheese ( gauda, mozzarella etc... ).
and make silo structure there