Ideal Page Length for Google - in Words

300, 350, 500 or more?

[coburn]

Golden question:
What is the 'ideal' length for a page? (for G SERPs)

Have seen figures ranging from 300 to 500 bandied about - but as of yet, no supporting data/research.

(Mainly concerned with content type sites/portals)

[goodroi]

If you look at what is ranking in Google you will see that top ranking pages range from 2k to 100k. IMHO the number of words and the page size are not very important. As long as you have enough relevant content for a manual review and usability you are ok.

[birdstuff]

From an SEO standpoint, it depends on the topic, keyword density, etc.

From a user standpoint, just enough to tell the story you're trying to tell.

[walkman]

I have seen pages with just two-three unique sentences outrank the rest. Fort mostly dupe reasons, I suggest more than 2-3 sentences though. Soon or later it will catch up with you :)

[caveman]

What goodroi said. We've got tiny little pages doing well, and novella length pages doing well. Here's a case where size doesn't matter, much.

[moltar]

I say think about the users first.

If a page is 2,000 words, chances are it has more than one subject.
If there are several topics on one page, it can obviosly be split in two pages.
After the split it will have it's own subject, <title>, <h1> and IBLs.
Everyone wins.

[SebastianX]

The optimal number of words per page gets determined as follows:

Resize your browser window to fit 800*600 resolution.

Create a page with three columns below the page title in a H1 tag. In the first column put your menu. In the third column put an AdSense 'Wide Skyscraper' ad (160*600).

Write your copy and paste it into the second column. Reload the page. If the ads match your topic, fine. If not, rewrite your text or add more or remove fillers.

You have written too much words, if the middle column exceeds the height of the right ad.

Link to this page and leave it alone until Googlebot has fetched it 2-4 times. Time to index is 2 days, so reload the page 2 days after the last Googlebot visit to check whether the ads still match your content (respectively the keyword phrase you're after). If not, tweak your wording.

Then re-arrange the ads and move on. You've achieved the optimal number of words per page for your keyword phrase.

J/K

[martinibuster]

This is how I look at it:

• Small pages have a limited number of potential query matches.
• Large pages have a larger pool of query matches, including longtail searches.

Even though small pages are supposed to do well for targeted money words, I find I can still do it with a larger page if I use link monkey business.

[caveman]

> You have written too much words, if the middle column exceeds the height of the right ad

This is too narrow a view. Check out a few of the more obvious exmples of brilliantly effective looooooooooonnnnnng copy, e.g, ebook publishers for instance. ;-)

[tedster]

One of the positive effects of the extremely complex Google algorithm is that less and less are there any "cookie cutter" rules that you can line up with in order to get good ranking on the SERPs. The algo is freeing web authors to write, more and more, for their human audience rather than for search engines.

For all that I may fret about the inscrutibility of the algo changes at times, especially when good sites get buried in a collateral damage scenario, this shift is something I applaud - and I also feel it is one of the LONG term goals that Google set out to achieve.

[SebastianX]

>This is too narrow a view. Check out a few of the more obvious exmples of brilliantly effective looooooooooonnnnnng copy, e.g, ebook publishers for instance. ;-)

You've noticed the 'J/K', others may have not. It was meant as a persiflage on AdSense optimized content sites.

Seriously, a loooong copy with fair link popularity attracts way more SE traffic, especially if it is supported by a few tiny pages which are naturally optimized for particular phrases, for example footnote pages pointing out details or one-page definitions of particular terms used in the long copy. This structure is comfortable for all users, either for experts on the topic and interested newbies as well, thus Google honors it.

[Wizard]

There is no such thing as ideal page length for Google. Because if there were, SE spammers would create crap sites with all pages with this length, and then Google would use it to detect spam, and the ideal page length would be penalized :)) The point is to avoid doing things that look as spam, and site with most pages of too similiar word count obviously look as one.

And according to the new patent, is it likely that Google rewards growing content, so this is additional argument against 'ideal length' theory. Obviously page length cannot grow forever, and obviously page cannot gain points from content growth factor forever, but it isn't bad to start with page one or two paragraphs long and add a paragraph from time to time.