Small pages rank best

Not a good thing

[crobb305]

Has anyone else noticed that very small pages rank highest in MSN? This could explain why doorways and blogspots rank so well. To test this, I reduced text on my homepage down to just a paragraph or so, with links to my internal pages. The content reduced from 22k to about 5k. Within 2 days, the page went from page 5 to page 1 for a competitive phrase.

This is a bad thing to me because it devalues content. Their task should be to index the world's content/information. Not the world's blurbs and doorways. Simple pages designed to sell something are out ranking articles and informative pages. Why?

Of course this experiment comes at a price: reducing the content within a document just to rank better on MSN means ranking on fewer longtail phrases in Google (since Google actually indexes and ranks pages based on content), thus I am seeing a sharp drop in traffic overall (down 50% from the previous 3 Sundays). This drop also implies that despite having wonderful rankings in MSN, their traffic levels are simply not worth the time and energy right now. Time to revert the page back to my pre-experiment content.

[the_el_man]

I think its a good thing that MSN is different. Last thing we wont is everyone to be the same as Google.

[BillyS]

>>Perhaps this has something to do with page loading time and less about stricly page size and content length?

I'm on a pretty fast server and my pages are very efficient. I've worked with images, CSS files as well as the site templates to make sure they are optimized. I, for one, have tried to make sure my pages load quickly even on slow connections.