Just to be clear, Google said this before – Google: Few Strong Pages > Many Weak Ones but here John Mueller explained it a bit more. He said that when you take one big stronger page and split it up into multiple pages might make it harder for Google to figure out the target of those multiple pages.

He said “those smaller pieces themselves might not be that clearly kind of targeted where we can really recognize actually all of the information is here and they can navigate to the rest of the site here.”

The messaging from Google since the Panda days has been about less is more, in terms of pages.

John said at 8:32 into the last hangout from Friday:

Forum discussion at YouTube.