The 100 Kb Phase Transition

Something Quirky Goes Down When A Page Becomes Larger Than 100 Kb

[CheeseburgerBrown]

If you've seen any of my threads earlier this month you know I've been running a continuous battle with Google to keep my ads on target on a specific blog, ensuring that each new post had the requisite keyword density to keep AdSense from running bizarre, unrelated ads or, worse, PSAs.

So, another anecdote from the front:

When the size of my blog front page exceeded 100 Kb, the MediaBot totally lost its way. While I'd been riding on the fence (alternating between PSAs on the main banner and targetted ads) for a few days, going over 100 kb dumped me squarely into no-target-space -- wall to wall PSAs and ads for things like "funny T-shirts" (i.e., NO relation to page content).

I trimmed off just enough fat to bring the page back down to 98 kb, with the same content. Presto: targeted ads are back, and staying.

So, it's just one anecdote. Take it for what it's worth.

[nanotopia]

People accessing your site via dialup must love you now, but now they won't get that bathroom breaks that they're used to getting.

[fischermx]

I have pages larger than 200Kb and ads are always 100% on target.
Be sure you have proper keywords and description meta tags, Mediabot does use them!

[nanotopia]

I have pages larger than 200Kb

Dialup users, the bathroom breaks are back on. Get drinking.

[bigbaddad]

Hi all,

I know this may be a little off topic, but what is a “good” size for dialup users.

I try to keep my pages as small as possible. However, I am using a database and as I add data my pages are growing. I see most of them topping out at 60-65 K.

I could split them but I really don’t want to. I like the format and having all the information on a single page. On the other hand, I don’t want people to leave before they even see the site.

I’ve seen people recommend 25K and today I saw that MSN recommends pages stay under 150K.

What do you think?

[wonderboy]

Everyone will say as low as possible. High on text, low on everything else.

10-25k is good in my opinion.

My pages go up to 80k, which is far too high in my opinion, but I like pretty things.

W.

[blogger]

I have several very large blog categories. Two, including images, are over a meg. Three have no or few images and are over 500k. 14 other categories are over 100k.

Because of the way I've rearranged MovableType's templates and set up the stylesheet, the center column containing the text loads immediately, followed (after a long wait) by the left and right navigation columns, one of which contains adsense. I moved the adsense block a few screens down the page in the belief that people will have reached that point when the page has loaded.

I just checked two categories (one of the >1 Meg and a .74 Meg) and adsense was on generally on target for both. The large one is a bit of a travelogue, but it's got other stuff in it so it wasn't as travel-oriented as I would have wished, but it was close enough.

I could paginate these, but I want to be able to do finds on the whole page, and I want people who visit my site in order to do research to be able to do the same thing. That's become less of an issue since I installed a (MovableType) full text search, but I still want that capability.

Google sends most of my traffic to my individual entries, but I still get a fair amount of traffic and even some adsense clicks in the archives even if most of the clicks are in the individual entries.

[Powdork]

Keep in mind Google's 100 kb is not the same as yours. The bot's don't take the images so the page sizes you see in the Google serps are just referencing the amount on the page rather than the images or multimedia called with the page.
Cheeseburger Brown, I would take a hard, hard look at the fat you trimmed. There may have been something in there misleading the hapless MediapartnersBot.

[edit_g]

I'd really be worrying if my pages were 100k plus. Running large e-commerce sites I've managed to keep them below 40k - why can't a blog?