What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings?

What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: A question from Deepesh in New York who 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, sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.” I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. You know, back in the early days of Google, we used to truncate out about a hundred kilobytes, and so if you had a “page bloat” back then, I could imagine that your content might get snipped off, you know, halfway through where you wouldn’t see all of it. But Google does a much better job of seeing the entire page now. We don’t truncate at 100 kilobytes anymore. We can deal with a larger page. So, I wouldn’t really worry about “page bloat.” We intend to do a very good job of finding the content. So, if you have extra images, don’t worry about that. If you have extra HTML, you know, markup, don’t worry about that. I think the assumption that only SEOed pages, you know, that don’t have very many images, or that have very thin HTML designs, are the winners, I’m not sure I agree with that because if you think about it, there are a lot of big sites and well-known brands that do well and they often have very big pages, they might have flash or they might have, you know, a lot of images and things like that. So, there might be some niches where you’re paying attention to and it looks like only the sort of a very focused pages with a lot of content do well. But we try to return the best page, the most relevant page no matter what the query is. So, don’t worry about it to the degree that you’re going to start making radical changes, pruning down content. Go ahead and do whatever you think is best for your users, the most informative, and relevant page that you can make, and then we’ll try to return that, and we do a very good job of handling a so-called “bloat” and, you know, finding what the real content is on a page.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

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