Code to Text Ratio

I've seen a few bits around referring to 'Code to Text Ratio'.

I've searched around DP to find out more but all a bit vague.

My question is: Does it matter as far as google goes?

My other question is: If so, which is better - higher amount of text or higher amount of code?

Twelfty

 

more text is better, more content for the search engines.

 

Depends on several factors and most important the them of your site. For blogs, obviously you would find text to code ratio higher whereas could be lower on other sites. What site is it about?

 

It would be nice to know the 'tipping point' at which a page is considered to have 'plenty of text' vs. 'just enough text to get noticed by the SE's'... but this is impossible, of course.

 

I think it doesn't matter, Google need qulity text. Don't care about code but if the page is too 'heavy' with codes that can be a limiting factor for crawl.

 

I agree with the last post. Google is smart enough to know what is code and what isn't and they don't care about how much code you have on your page. Proof: Check this interview with Google's Vanessa Fox:

"Google just doesn't really care all that much about the code to text ratio. We're going to pick up the text, extract it from the page and we're going to really ignore the code."

http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/

 

Clean, simple code matters to SEO. The leaner the better as it makes easier for the search engines to read your pages.

Clean, simple code means a fairly high Code/Visible Text ratio.

The cleaner the code the closer to 100% this ratio will be. Naturally, you can not have more text than code, so 100% is the theoretical maximum that you can not reach.

I have my pages' ratio at about 30% and I handwrite the code for all my pages by hand as I hate WYSIWYG stuff.

 

Does it matter? As above said, any search engines can tell which part is code and which part is content displayed to visitors. Also can we control the code and text ratio?

 

Excessive code can increase load time for your pages.

The longer it takes to load your page the more likely it is for a visitor to just hit the back button.

 

Well, as far as getting indexed goes, it doesn't take much text at all.

http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:%22403+forbidden%22+%22You+don%27t+have+permission+to+access%22&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&start=200&sa=N

And since none of those pages are supp, many people would conclude that they don't trip the duplicate content penalty either.

-Michael

 

Nice find Michael! That was pretty good. Point well made.

 

Thanks, Mike. Yup, that's some relevant and useful stuff G. is indexing there...

 

Sure can. With CSS you can eliminate all the tables and a whole bunch of code.

 

I would say anything over 25% content is good and anything under 7-10% is bad. This is just speculation though.

 

I agree with duilen.

Also think about it in the aspect of load time and user experience.

Less Code = Less Wait.