Text to Code Ratio: Does it really matter?
If you at all read webmaster forums you’ve likely stumbled upon a posting stating that a good code to content ratio is imperitive good search engine rankings. While in theory this sounds good, however in applicatation it is pretty easy to see that this is a fallacy, at least in terms of the major 3 search engines.
Doing a search for “Google”, as a an example in any of the search engines will point us to Google’s home page. If you’ve visited Googles home page, you’ve noticed the severe lack of text, and upon viewing the souce code for the Google home page you can see that there is much more code than text.
Ok, so Google is a monster; we’ll choose another subject. Try searching for “Auto insurance” in Google. It’s a pretty popular search term with almost 44 million results in the SERPS - and the number one page, geico.com, has very little text on it: again there is significantly more coding than content.
I guess to make my point, we can take it straight from the mouth of Vanessa Fox of Google as reported by Web Pro News:
“This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say - it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.
The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio. . . “
So - take is straight from the mouth of Google, and do your own research and see the results. Do a search for a very popular search term in any major search engine, check out the results and view the source code for these top ranking pages. You’ll find that in terms to text to code, it really doesn’t matter in regards to your websites rankings.
Leave a Reply