SciBud
07-13-2007, 05:13 PM
Does code to text ratio still matter for SEO?
grace
07-13-2007, 05:29 PM
it is important to SEO because it calculates the relevancy of a site....
through this you will know the WEB PAGE SIZE, CODE SIZE AND TEXT SIZE..
seochat DOT com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/ - this is the site where you can check the Code to text Ration
Text is important so yes, to some degree! 0% text and 100% code might cause problems. :)
mcanerin
07-13-2007, 07:07 PM
The code to text ratio has no direct influence on rankings that I'm aware of. A search engine is looking at your content, not your code, when it looks at relevance.
There are 3 reasons some people look at this ratio:
1. Loading speed. In the old days, a lot of code on a page would significantly slow down a site (and it's server) without adding to the content value. Therefore, professionals began to optimize their code. Today, unless you have a really slow server it's not usually an issue, though I do see pages load up slowly because of this. In general, if a search engine detects that your website is slow, it will slow down it's indexing of the site, and may trust it less. But this is indirect. If you had a very fast server, then a search engine would not care.
2. Page size. This is related to loading speed, but a search engine will usually only load the first 100K or so of a page. If that 100k is mostly code instead of text, then your whole page would not be indexed. This is an extreme example, because you'd have to have a LOT of code for this to be an issue.
3. Professionalism. This is really where people started talking about code/text ratios. Amateurs write spaghetti code, don't document their work and use inefficient HTML practices. Therefore a high code/text ratio was a sign of a badly designed website. Honestly, this is more opinion than fact. It became very popular around the "everyone should use CSS" revolution days, and is strongly related to it.
In the first 2 of these cases, the ratio isn't the issue, it's the overall size of the page that is. There could be no code on the page at all and it could still have over 100k of text on it, slowing it down and preventing full indexing.
In the third case, it's a design issue, not an SEO issue. It's good to have well designed web pages. It's nice to optimize your images, code, etc. But that's not SEO - that's website design (and possibly usability).
A small, fast page that happens to have more code in it than text will not have any issues, SEO-wise. Search engines do not execute code. They do not check to see if the page validates. They do not care if it's hand-rolled code or a commercial template. They do not care if it uses CSS or tables. They don't even care if it's really ugly.
They only care if they can find it, read it, and trust it.
Ian