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Ramon Eijkemans's avatar

Hmm, so i guess one basic thing to do is making sure evergreen articles are on a single url, instead of ‘chapters’ which many, VERY, thorough articles have

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Harry Clarkson-Bennett's avatar

I'd say it would almost always make more sense to have singular articles on one URL, unless there's a reason it makes sense for the user not to do so. But for the purposes of this oatent, yes!

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Ramon Eijkemans's avatar

Agreed. A site i’ve am working on has for years been creating really in-depth (as in: insanely in-depth) product reviews. At some point in the past, they decided to cut those huge articles into ‘chapters’. I honestly don’t know why, maybe back then the impression value for pageviews/banners was higher.

But anyway, we just migrated all those chapters into a unified, single url view, so we’ll see what happens :)

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Harry Clarkson-Bennett's avatar

Good luck! I suspect it's the right move, let me know how it goes

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Ramon Eijkemans's avatar

Yup. Asked Mistral: 👉🏼 “Based on the patent’s description, the intended definition of an **"article"** in US20150379140A1 is **content published on a single URL**.

### Key Points from the Patent:

- The patent refers to "content of the one or more web pages" and "an in-depth article" as being associated with a **uniform resource locator (URL)** ([0006]).

- The system evaluates and scores content at the **page level**, not as a collection of pages.

- The examples and language used (e.g., "a respective in-depth article," "content of the one or more web pages") suggest that each article is treated as a self-contained unit on a single URL.

### Your Scenario:

If your website has **chapters and an overview article spread across multiple URLs**, the patent’s approach would likely treat each URL as a separate article. The system does not explicitly describe aggregating content from multiple URLs into a single "article" for the purpose of scoring or surfacing in search results.

### Practical Implications:

- If you want your content to be recognized as a single in-depth article, you might need to ensure that the **core content is accessible on a single URL** (e.g., by providing a consolidated version or using canonical tags to indicate the primary URL).

- Alternatively, you could structure your site so that the overview page links to the chapters, but the patent’s method would still evaluate each URL independently.

### Further Consideration:

- The patent focuses on **identifying and scoring individual pages**, not groups of pages. If your chapters are interdependent, you may need to optimize each page individually or provide a landing page that summarizes the entire article, linking to the chapters.”

-> Thought so. Good thing i was already doing this for this client for which this is relevant 😅

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Ivan Palii's avatar

Great guide, thanks! This also may explain why my content on Medium under my subfolder @ivanpalii ranks so well

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Harry Clarkson-Bennett's avatar

Tyvm! Possibly, although your stuff is pretty darn good too.

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