What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings?
June 20, 2009 by admin
Filed under google rankings
Deepesh from New York asks:
“What impact does ‘page bloat’ have on google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design) – sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.”
Recorded on April 23, 2009.
Duration : 0:1:52
[youtube B8RQHgV0IAU]
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ShaneSelby on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
I thought google …
I thought google doesn’t read javascript or css?
heenan73 on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
I suspect Mr Cutts …
I suspect Mr Cutts is answering the question as asked, rather than giving the full picture – is page bloat (benign) the same as code bloat (possibly malignant) I suspect not.
kevinargh on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
Lean sites probably …
Lean sites probably do well because they load faster and people can click through more pages without getting frustrated.
jonathandingman on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
Well yeah, he’s …
Well yeah, he’s definitely not recommending you have a page that’s 1.5mb in total size, that’s still a really bad idea.
look at your crawl stats under Google Webmaster Central and see how long it’s taking googlebot to download your page. Typically, lower latency+faster response time will return better results. Not necessarily better rankings, but googlebot will more likely want to crawl more pages if they’re not having to download 1.5mb per page.
DanielDavidAllen on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
I agree.
I agree.
DanielDavidAllen on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
While I agree with …
While I agree with you Matt that page bloat isn’t as big of a thing as it used to be- if two sites are competing for the same keywords and one has trim concise code that separates markup from content, loads faster, etc. – if all other things like domain authority and linkbacks are the same – I can see page bloat being a factor that will negative effect rankings.
fewsilly on Sat, 20th Jun 2009 4:02 am
I understand that …
I understand that Google can figure out a lot of things but isn’t it better if Google does not have to figure out anything?
Page bloat is still bad. I see websites that have a 1.5MB footprint and lots and lots of websites have 100k just in javascript.