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Webmaster Articles
/ What Size Of Body Section Ranks Highest?
What Size Of Body Section Ranks 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 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
http://www.searchenginegeek.com/graphs/deg02.gif
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.
Jon Ricerca is the lead researcher and author of the
Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at
SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF
reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
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