10 replies to this topic

[copywriter]

Was reading an article on Squidoo and came across this.

10. Have a high content-to-code ratio
Your pages should have a high content-to-code ratio, also known as a high signal-to-noise ratio.

The author goes on to say that search engines are not fond of pages that have more code than content and that they've implemented a specific ratio in their algos to look for such things.

Never heard of this before... sounds like another urban legend.

Anybody have any confirmation and/or proof?

[SelfMade]

Spiders love text!!!!

Have I said too much? oops!

[Jill]

Yeah, I believe I answered that same question recently in the HRA somewhere.

IMO, it's a load of hooey as are most things discussed in regards to SEO.

[added]Oh yeah it was the 10 SEO Questions article. (See #4)

[copywriter]

Well, that's what I thought, too Jill, but wanted to confirm. I mean, it really doesn't make sense. On an ecommerce product page, for example, you'd have a ton of code for the various elements (shopping cart buttons, javascript for larger image views, page layout, etc., etc., etc.) and very little text (usually 60-100 words for a product description). Just not logical.

It sounded like one of those silly rumors that get started from who knows where.

[chrishirst]

Was reading an article on Squidoo and came across this.
The author goes on to say that search engines are not fond of pages that have more code than content and that they've implemented a specific ratio in their algos to look for such things.

Never heard of this before... sounds like another urban legend.

This side of the pond there is a more descriptive phrase than "urban legend"

talking Boll... Nonsense

[Michael-F]

Sounds like something that would come out of the web standards crowd.

[gert]

Hi,

Have heard that quite often as well... to me it would make sense as search engines' attempt to decrease the amount of data to crawl and have website authors focus more on clean and slim coding - as the amount of data continiously increases I could well imagine search engines to increasingly consider code-related aspects ... guess it could be more interpreted as a "write clean and slim code" than a "have an X:Y code-content-ratio"

cheers,

Gert

[chrishirst]

Hi,

Have heard that quite often as well... to me it would make sense as search engines' attempt to decrease the amount of data to crawl and have website authors focus more on clean and slim coding - as the amount of data continiously increases I could well imagine search engines to increasingly consider code-related aspects ... guess it could be more interpreted as a "write clean and slim code" than a "have an X:Y code-content-ratio"

cheers,

Gert

HOW exactly does it "make sense"?

If I have a particular design that requires more markup code than the text that is contained within it, WHAT exactly has that got to do with "a search engine".

They are NOT the ultimate authority on the Internet on design and coding practices.

"Decrease the amount of data to crawl"??
That shows a lack of understanding of what SE crawlers actually "do". Just as the people who come up with these wild theories do not understand the fundamentals of "how things work".
It takes microseconds for the source code to be "read" from the server, it would have to be several hundred Megabytes (images are NOT loaded) of source code to take longer.

I could write a software routine that would take remove all markup elements (and just leave the text) from a page of source code in a fraction of a second when it runs so I pretty sure something like that could be coded by the programmers who write the SE indexing code.

http://videos.webpro...oogle-sitemaps/ 4:40 in

[copywriter]

Welcome Gert!

Chris... I figured it was bunk. Logically it makes no sense, but I wanted to check. I knew the whole clean code mess has always been a myth (Google won't crawl mess/bloated code, etc., etc. ... yeah, right!) so I figured this was just as silly.

What possible difference to relevance/rankings could how much code vs. how much content make?

[piskie]

I have always thought that there was some basis to the basic concept of code to content ratio. However,I considered it to only kick in significantly when the code was ridiculously massive.

Lets go to an extreme shall we:
Imagine an HTML file size of 100mb with say 100 words of text.
Would that be treated as equal to the same 100 words of text in a page with an HTML file size of say 3kb

I think when ratios get to such an extreme there are handicaps. If so, therefore it stands to reason that somewhere at a lower level, such disadvantage/s must kick in.

[Jill]

Well, piskie, extreme anything is typically not a good thing in any area of life.