how much of a page do search engines read?

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how much of a page do search engines read?

spacecase

10:41 pm on Jul 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

I recall reading something about how search engines might basically stop reading partway through a page, and why that is a good reason to keep pages sizes small.

At the moment I'm wondering about what to include in the <head> -- whether I should just leave out stuff like <meta name="author" content="my name" /> or not. But knowing more about this will certainly help me make better decisions in the future.

Is this true? Do some search engines stop reading / indexing a page after X number of bytes? And if so does stuff in the <head> count towards that?

Thanks!

Hoystidd

2:02 pm on Jul 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

This is a good question and I look foward to hearing what others have to say about this...

I tend to be pretty long in my pages but so do many of the "internet marketing guru's". I'm talking 1000's of words on one page...

A neat little tool that you can look at to get an idea of what the spiders see after crawling your site would be the "Search Engine Spider Simulator" that comes with 'Internet Business Promoter (IBP)' from Axandra...

I use the Trial Version just to see what spiders see...

Works well...

I hope this helps and I hope it's cool that I suggested a product. Don't quite know if that is frowned upon in these parts... If so, please feel free to remove this post or edit it as you will...

Be Great!
Guy

John_Caius

6:30 pm on Jul 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

[webmasterworld.com...]

spacecase

8:03 pm on Jul 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

Wow, 100k is so much more than any pages I have... I was afraid it was like 3k!

Thanks for your response, I knew there had to be other people asking the same question but I didn't think to phrase a search in terms of 'caching'.