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 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 truncate at about 100 kilobytes. So if you had a “page bloat” back then, I could imagine that your content might get snipped off halfway through, or you wouldn’t see any of it.

But Google does a much better job now of seeing the whole page, we don’t truncate at 100 kilobytes anymore. We can deal with a larger page.

I wouldn’t really worry about “page bloat”, we intend to do a very good job of finding the content. If you have extra images, don’t worry about that. If you have extra HTML, don’t worry about that.

I think that the assumption of ‘only SEOed pages that don’t have very much images or have very thin HTML designs’ are the winners.

I’m not sure I agree with that.

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 a lot of images and things like that.

There might be some niches that you’re paying attention to, where it looks like that only these focused pages with a lot of content do well.

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 where you might be doing some radical changes, pruning down content. Go ahead and do what’s best for your users, the most informative and relevant page that you can make. We’ll try to return that.

We do a very good job of handling so-called ‘bloat’ and finding what the real content on the page is.

Related posts:

1. Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?
2. What impact does server location have on Google rankings?
3. There seems to be little impact on visitors where in the site’s structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php?
4. We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?
5. Will Google find text in images someday?