What impact does "page bloat" have on Google rankings?

[internettopmentor]

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[BirminghamDan]

Matt Cutts is talking too much about how Google can handle things.

I suggest Google will soon get back to worrying about "what the user can handle"... and bloated pages can crash a lot of slow systems for the user. So, Page Bloat Does matter in futureproof SEO even if Google are overlooking its significance this year.

[bhicks111]

Regardless, why not have a clean, well-designed page!

[heenan73]

I suspect Mr Cutts is answering the question as asked, rather than giving the full picture - is page bloat (benign) the same as code bloat (possibly malignant) I suspect not.

[kevinargh]

Lean sites probably do well because they load faster and people can click through more pages without getting frustrated.

[jonathandingman]

Well yeah, he's definitely not recommending you have a page that's 1.5mb in total size, that's still a really bad idea.

look at your crawl stats under Google Webmaster Central and see how long it's taking googlebot to download your page. Typically, lower latency+faster response time will return better results. Not necessarily better rankings, but googlebot will more likely want to crawl more pages if they're not having to download 1.5mb per page.

[tantamnt]

Googlebot does not have "wants"

[DanielDavidAllen]

While I agree with you Matt that page bloat isn't as big of a thing as it used to be- if two sites are competing for the same keywords and one has trim concise code that separates markup from content, loads faster, etc. - if all other things like domain authority and linkbacks are the same - I can see page bloat being a factor that will negative effect rankings.

[fewsilly]

I understand that Google can figure out a lot of things but isn't it better if Google does not have to figure out anything?

Page bloat is still bad. I see websites that have a 1.5MB footprint and lots and lots of websites have 100k just in javascript.

[DanielDavidAllen]

I agree.

[ShaneSelby]

I thought google doesn't read javascript or css?

[rahnas]

Google now read javascript, css, and xml too :)

[ShaneSelby]

ok. Thanks =)