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

A question from Deepesh in New York. Deepesh asks, “What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few image HTML-only design) – sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.”

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Back in the early days of Google we used to trunk aid data about a 100 kilobytes. So if you’ve had page-bloat back then, I could imagine that your content might got snipped off a half way through and we wouldn’t see all of it. But Google does a much better job of seeing the entire page now; we don’t trunk aid at 100 Kb’s anymore we can deal with a larger page. So I wouldn’t really worry about page-bloat, we tend 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 markup don’t worry about that. I think the assumption that only the SEOed pages that don’t have very many images or they have very thin HTML designs are the winners, I’m not sure I’d agree with that, because if you think about it, there are a lot of really good sites and well known brands, they do well and they often have very big pages, they might have flash they might have a lot of images or things like that. So there might be some niches where you might where you paying attention to and looks like only these 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 you are going to start making radical changes pruning down content. Go ahead and do what you think is the best for your users the most informative and relative pages that you can make and we’ll try to return that and we do a very good job of handling bloat and finding what the real content is on the real page.

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