What Size Web Pages Rank Highest?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.searchenginegeek.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 I naturally performed last month using
the leading search engine and analyzed them. I had to visit each
page and write down the size of the page (not counting graphics...
just the size of the HTML). Those sizes were then tabulated for
the first 10 rankings and converted into a normalized "ranking
correlation".
The
resulting number shows each group of page 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.
That
is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have groups
of page sizes varying from 0 to >100K bytes.
Here
is the graph:
There
is an obvious correlation, which shows that pages of a size between
30K and 60K generally rank much higher than shorter or longer
pages. The peak of the graph shows that pages between 50-60K rank
the very highest. This goes against the popular belief that states
that shorter pages (less than 10K) rank highest. The popular belief
is shown to be completely inaccurate with this study.
Notes:
1.
For the purposes of this test, the actually page size in bytes
was used. The page was saved to disk and then the 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 I performed during
the month.
Conclusion:
Pages
of a size between 50K and 60K rank best on the leading search
engine!
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.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
