31 replies to this topic

[acadia]

I had my site built by someone. I don't do coding myself. I understand it is important to have a cleanly coded site in order to get good SEO. Is it possible for someone like me who does not know html coding or cold fusion know whether my site is cleanly coded? Is this something I can recognize when looking behind the scenes with my web guy?

I can certainly ask him if it was cleanly coded, but I want to be able to confirm these things for myself.

Let me know if this is possible. I appreciate your help.

[qwerty]

I understand it is important to have a cleanly coded site in order to get good SEO.

That's another urban SEO myth. If your code is so convoluted that a search engine spider can't get through it, that's one thing, but while there are some advantages to keeping your code as clean as possible (no nested tables, no formatting anywhere but the CSS, external scripts, valid code and document type declaration), it won't help your rankings.

[acadia]

Thank you!

[Jill]

Funny, lots of threads on this, this week. Was there an article out there saying clean code was important this week or something?

[Scottie]

Cleanly Coded Sites, What do they look like?

They look pretty much the same as the dirty coded sites.

[Karri]

I am going to put my head on the chopping block here (?) and admit that I have read the book SEO for Dummies by Peter Kent (am I allowed to say that?).

Anyway, the book is actually an interesting if you are just cutting your teeth on the subject of seo, fwiw. Kent says that "dirty" code (he he - that IS funny Scottie LOL) can be a nuisance for the SEs to dig through in terms of number of characters in the code before the actual content appears.

Is this off base then?
Karri

[Ron Carnell]

an·thro·po·mor·phism (ăn'thrə-pə-môr'fĭz'əm) n.
The attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to nonhuman organisms or inanimate objects.

Software programs don't consider a few hundred, or even a several thousand, extraneous characters to be much of a nuisance. Fact is, they don't really get annoyed. They have a goal, which they either fulfill or don't fulfill, with not much leeway for anything in between those extremes. In that sense, at least, spiders are a whole lot more forgiving than your human visitors.

[Karri]

Do you think this idea of "dirty" or extraneous code then is more to do with how fast an SE indexes the page in the first place? Or are you saying that the whole idea is just off base? Do tell.
Karri

[maleman]

I am going to put my head on the chopping block here (?)

Don't fret Karri. I was born with my head on the chopping block and I've been treading in deep water ever since.

It's my belief that it doesn't make any difference if you have a lot of markup tags, sloppy coding, a lot of code, or sparse coding so long as it's error free.

Programs will dig through that code lickety-split, pass up what they don't care about, and find what they're looking for.

For example: Take a massive page of text on an html page in Internet Explorer and hit Edit-->Find. Search for any word on that page. The program will find the next instance of that word virtually instantaneously. If the word isn't on the page, it will tell you it's not there, again instantaneously.

When any other well-written, modern-day program scans a page, it will find what it's looking for just as fast.

The troubles I see with a lot of cluttered code are:
1. Errors. This can slow down or screw up the scan.
2. Slow downloading
3. Hard for a human to read/edit

The most important thing is make sure you code is error free and it's a kicker to also have a nice, clean style.

Edited by maleman, 23 September 2005 - 10:33 PM.

[qwerty]

Clean code is a wonderful thing. Back in a previous life, when I was planning on being a programmer, they talked to us about "elegant code". The difference there was that on an executable file, elegant code will run better than sloppy code, because sloppy code is likely to use more system resources. What elegant code for a client/server app has in common with clean code for a web page is that the good stuff is easy to work with. You can see what serves what purpose, changing one thing won't break the whole page, and you can feel pretty secure that it's going to work the same way on one platform as it does on another.

But it aint gonna help your rankings.

[Karri]

So I guess that adding an external src attribute to a <script> tag is pretty much something to do on a Friday (or Thursday ) night when you have nothing better to do for kicks then?

Hmph. How about doc.write (or whatever it's called)? Also for geeks with no social life?

Talk about a learning curve. A fun one though. =;

Karri

[qwerty]

External scripts, like external style sheets, make your life easier. If the script is to run on more than one page, you'd be crazy to put it on all of them instead of making it a separate file. Why?

1. If you need to change it, you only need to change it in one place.
2. Once it's been called by the browser, it's cached, so it's faster.

Don't let anyone tell you it's a mistake to clean things up. Unless you're talking about a disposable site, it'll save you time and headaches in the long run. But just because something's good, doesn't mean it's going to make everything that could possibly be associated with it good.

[Raphael]

Do you think this idea of "dirty" or extraneous code then is more to do with how fast an SE indexes the page in the first place?  Or are you saying that the whole idea is just off base?  Do tell.
Karri

My reply in the "other" clean code thread might help here. I'm gonna link it since it's a lot of text.....

http://www.highranki...pic=16989&st=15

[Randy]

Just MHO...

I like clean code. Or relatively clean code anyway. However it has nothing at all to do with the search engines.

The main thing to remember is that the spiders and such are not like your typical web browser. So an HTML coding error that would cause browsers to completely flake out would not necessarily cause any problems at all for the spiders or algo's.

By the same token, it is entirely possible that other errors that would fly right through a browser that might cause the search engines to freak out.

Is clean code a good thing? Yes. Is portable code --where you're referencing external files-- a good thing? Yes.

However for the most part the engines don't really care.

[maleman]

So I guess that adding an external src attribute to a <script> tag is pretty much something to do on a Friday (or Thursday blush.gif) night when you have nothing better to do for kicks then?

Hmph. How about doc.write (or whatever it's called)? Also for geeks with no social life?

Go ahead and put the script and your CSS in external files, I do. Especially if they're used on multiple pages. It makes a cleaner source.

For short scripts used on one page only, just put it in the <head> or wherever you need it.

What do you mean "no social life"? I have a social life! I have a social life, I think. Maybe I do. At least occasionally, once in a blue moon, sometimes.

Edited by maleman, 24 September 2005 - 02:51 AM.