Does compression help with search engines?

Compression and search engine ranking

[Holmes]

All,

I've got a friend who wrote a piece of code that will compress a webpage by removing all 'extra' spaces (and tabs, new lines, etc.) from all places other than script and pre tags.

Obviously this will make the page smaller, but will it
also increase the pages search engine position? The entire page will appear to exist on one line (more if script or pre is used).

Can anyone back this theory with real experience?

Thanks

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Holmes.

I highly doubt that will affect any SE's ranking algorithm, but it should make the page a little bit quicker for your visitors, so you may see some benefit on that end.

[sun818]

Making a web page less redundant in itself won't increase your rankings. There is an upper limit with some search engines such as Google, that will only read the first 101Kb [webmasterworld.com] of a web page's HTML. So, if those links further down in the HTML are not indexed that could cause issues with search engine rankings. I know the home page of an eCommerce site that lists all their products on their home page. Lots of redundant spaces in their HTML. Only their products that start with A,B, or C is in the Google cache. I imagine the rest of their products are being ignored by Google.

[Herath]

Enable HTTP compression on your webserver and it will serve compressed files only if the browser recognizes compressed formats(i.e. gzip)

SE robots will not have any trouble with this since they do not tell your server that they understand compressed files.

Our home page (HTML text) shinked from 38k to 6k after enabling HTTP compression.