Annoying Multiple Page Slideshow Articles - Open Letter to Publishers

I don't know exactly what these are called so if you know the correct term for them, let me know in the comments but I like to call them multi page articles or slideshow articles. I am sure you guys have come across these in your journeys across the world wide web. it seems like every idiot with a website is joining this super annoying trend.

I am talking about those articles that make you click next next next to read every little bit of information. These articles are generally numbered - Top 10 ways to scratch yourself or Top 5 Reasons Your Mom is so Popular etc and to get to see all the top 5 or top 10 tips, you have to keep clicking the next button.

So Please! Webmasters and Publishers. Please stop publishing your articles in this way and just let us see the whole thing in one page (or two)

For those people who say that a lot of these websites provide links to be able to see the article in one page for printing purposes, I will say that you are right! They do provide this facility but at the end of the article so you will have to get to page 16 to be able to see it!

This kind of slideshow article structure makes absolutely no sense from an SEO point of view, at least the way we were taught SEO. If you divide up your article into 10 sections and put each section on separate pages, then how is it providing a beneficial user experience? These webpages have clearly less content per page than a webpage that does not require your to click 87 times to read one article so why is it that they get such high rankings?

I understand if your article has a lot of graphic heavy imagery in it and you want to break it up so people don't have to wait a long time for the whole article to load up but most of these articles are not like that at all. They are content light and mostly super lame fluff pieces.

A lot of big companies are doing this kind of publishing as well. MSN is one example of a website that divides its articles into multiple pages and requires users to keep clicking. If the point is to be able to get more ad impressions, then that is pretty despicable.

But all in all I have to say that these types of multiple page slideshow articles are hugely annoying and something must be done about it to improve the online experience.

If you hate these multi page slideshow articles as much I do, then let me know in the comments section and maybe we can do something about it if we all get together and protest them. If you come across these anywhere on the web, I encourage you to leave a comment on the website about how much you dislike this type of publishing.

Ever since webmasters and content publishers have started publishing their articles in this multi-page format, it has detracted from the quality of the web and has added nothing to provide a positive user experience.