What Size Body Section Ranks Highest?
By Jon Ricerca
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. 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 are the graphs for Yahoo and Google: http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/dey02.gif
(Note to Webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above
graphs or even copy them to your own site. Also feel free
to delete this note.) 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. Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca
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
http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/deg02.gif
