Laura, I think you summed it up best of all. However what about the SI issue?

Wouldn't adding all these pages be spreading everything a little bit too thin?

No good having all these lovely individual pages, well optimised (correct meta data & KW density) , perhaps with an image or two but nobody sees it.

Blitzen, great idea about consulting an owners maunual for topis - that may well help. Can't imagine there would be more than a handful though and I can't really see much more benefit having 5 pages rather than one page. Anyway thanks & I'll check that out today.

I think I'm leaning towards the individual pages. Just thinking about it now, look at these dictionary sites - they have 100,000's pages, one for each word and they seem to do OK. Do a search for "Definition <unusualword>" and these sites invariably pop up first. However even they (with 100,000's IBLs) can still suffer from the SI issue.

Look at this analysis:

Supplemental Ratio for Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus. Free access.
64.89%

Google has a total of 470000 pages indexed from Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus. Free access.
165000 are in the main index
305000 are in the supplemental index