Entry

Does the file size matter in search engine positioning?

Dec 31st, 2005 01:12
Deepak Sharma, Mohit Jain, amal k m, gajan raj, http://a-itindia.com, http://www.discount-rental-car-company.com, http://www.nakshatra.com

This article was originally written by Jon Ricerca. Amal, we should not 
post soneone else's article in our name. BTW, the article is very 
informative.
Rashmi
http://www.blueappleonline.com
-------------------
This is another one of the controversial questions in
many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forums, yet 
it is very easy to answer for any particular search 
engine. 
While popular belief seems to be that pages should be very 
short (less than 10K) to rank well with the leading search 
engine, this article conclusively answers that question~ 
with a completely different answer.
The methodology is really quite simple for this question. 
I gathered the results of the queries naturally performed 
last month by myself and three associates using Yahoo and 
Google. I then visited each page and wrote down the size 
of the body section of the page. Those sizes were then 
tabulated for the top 20 rankings and converted into a 
normalized "ranking correlation". 
The resulting number shows each group of body section 
sizes normalizing into a number between -100 and +100 
showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A 
value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the 
proper order to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS 
rank HIGHER than pages of another size. A value of -100 
shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to 
show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank LOWER than 
pages of another size. Numbers in between show the varying 
likelihood of rankings proportionally between -100 and 
+100.
There is an obvious correlation on Google, which shows 
that body sections of a size between 50K and 60K generally 
rank much higher than shorter or longer bodies. The Yahoo 
graph is a bit more erratic, but also shows a nice peak at 
60-70K (and another one at 20-30K). This goes against the 
popular belief that states that shorter pages rank 
highest. The popular belief is shown to be completely 
inaccurate with this study.
Notes:
1. For the purposes of this test, the actual body section 
size in bytes was used. The page was saved to disk and 
then everything before the body tag and after the end body 
tag were deleted. The resulting size of the file as 
reported by the operating system was used. Graphics and 
any other external references were completely ignored. 
2. Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined 
for this study.
3. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different 
keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries 
performed by myself and three associated during the prior 
month.
Conclusion:
Pages with a body section size between 50K and 70K rank 
best on the two leading search engines!
This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be 
determined from this study whether the leading search 
engine purposefully entertains this factor or not. The 
actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we 
studied, but the end result is that this search engine 
does, in fact, rank pages between 50K and 60K higher than 
pages of other sizes.
Amal ----
Adding to this very good information, I would like to bring to 
everyones notice that Google cache crawls for only upto 100kb. Rest of 
the code is left out resulting in drop in rankings.