Page Size and Indexing
Tue, 2 May, 2006 – 3:25 pm
An article has been added to SitePoint about the Search Engine Indexing Limits and what to expect the spiders to do with large pages. It's always been said, content is king and keep your filesizes small. But what's the right balance?nnI tend to tell clients to aim for 250-350 words per page which I think is just about right for a business site. However I also know blogs are very popular in search engines yet they (like mine) can have large front pages full of 10 or more posts at times.nnThe experiment in the article went by filesize, which of course includes code. So the less code you have in your page the better, which means strict XHTML markup and using CSS for styling. Spiders don't need to see styling so why show them your fancy orange text on a blue background (only kidding, don't use this please!). Just give them want they need, default black text on a white background with no frills.nnTo give the experiment in brief:nYahoo indexes up to 210kb of your pagenGoogle indexes up to 520kbnMSN indexes up to 1020kbnnWhat does this mean? To be honest, it's nice to know but it doesn't mean a great deal to most. Even the front page of my blog only hits an average of 40kb, that's only a fifth of Yahoo's limit! It's nice to know that long pages will be easily indexed by all of the big three of course. One extra point which was made was that the smaller pages were indexed and ranking quicker in MSN however, whereas the longer pages took 4-5 weeks. So if it's a new site I'd recommend more pages with smaller content on each, again the whole 250-350 words per page if possible.
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