How important is file size to search engines?

And what about text:html ratios.

[jp_css]

How important is file size to search engines?
And what about text:html ratios.

What would be some good numbers if anyone has any ideas.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I would not consider file size to be extremely important. There are many large files that are doing well for some fairly competitive search terms. But it is certainly an advantage to make files as small as possible. Very few of my files are larger than 10k.

It's nice to have more text than mark up. It may sometimes be difficult, but try to strive for that as an ideal.

[hughie]

When your talking about file size is that the HTML size(just the code) or the combined size of the webpage, images n all?

ta,
Hughie

[troels nybo nielsen]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, hughie. I was talking about text+html only which of course makes my statement somewhat unprecise, but even with images the huge majority of my pages are smaller than 10k.

We should not exaggerate the importance of those numbers, though. If the code is clean and if the important parts of the text are early in the file it does not really matter that the file perhaps is larger than it really needed to be.

[hughie]

Good stuff, clears things up a bit, now where did I put that 5 megapixel image ;-)

I've read in numerous places the smaller the better and I’m sure it's correct, but it's difficult to make quality readable content by stuffing it with keywords every other word.

I think there should be a degree in content writing for search engines from Webmaster World University.

[troels nybo nielsen]

> it's difficult to make quality readable content by stuffing it with keywords every other word

I hear that some members have been busy "un-stuffing" their websites in the last few months after having seen them getting killed by the filters in the SERPs of a certain search engine.

[hughie]

that’s interesting, looks like getting a balance is key.

I know someone in this business who's site is litterally stuffed to the gills with repeated keywords and he seems to do very nicely. He only has a PR of 4 but is in the top 2 places in google for one of the most competitive keywords out there (albeit a country-wide search).

He might have a suprise coming if things are moving away from those techniques.