Question: I noticed that a competing website has split up their product information into multiple pages (URLs). I was wondering if this is a good approach to follow or if I should avoid it because it might be seen as being spammy.

```
example.com/bikes/foo-bike/seat      //content about foo-bike's seat
example.com/bikes/foo-bike/wheels    //content about foo-bike's wheels
vs
example.com/bikes/foo-bike           //content about foo-bike's wheels and seat

```

Answer: 
As Zistoloen covers, creating more pages for the content increases the "surface area" for potential searches but there is an additional reason to split up content over multiple pages: it can drastically reduce your site's bounce rate (BR) and increase pages per visit (PPV).

By providing articles in small chunks, the user can not only navigate to preferred sections, but each time they do so it eliminates a potential bounce and increases PPV from one to at least two. Google does use BR and PPV as quality signals which will affect all of your content. So if you can **naturally** induce users into that second click on your site, it does have an overall positive effect on your SEO.
For an user guide, the goal is to think about users. That's why, it may be interesting for a reader to know specifically about foo bike's wheels; maybe to know how it works exactly and how to repare it if needed.

For SEO, it depends on the amount of text but if you can write 300 words on foo bike's wheels, it can be a good practice to split the foo bike's information in different pages because it increases the number of pages of the site and the user can find more easily the page about foo bike's wheels for example.

It would be totally different for an online shop (most probably a bad practice for SEO and users) because when you sell a foo bike, all the information about it must be in the page. Indeed, it's easier to find information for users and the page has most probably a lot of text (thus a page with a good weight for SEO).