Panda 4.0 Update Affected Site - What should be a the minimum Code to Text Ratio we should aim for ?

[SarahCollins]

Hi All,

My eCommerce site got hit badly with the Panda 4.0 update so we have been doing some site auditing and analysis identifying issues which need addressing.

We have thin/duplicate issues which I am quite sure was part of the reason we were affected by this even though we use rel=next and rel=prev along with having a separate view all page although we don't concanical tag to this page as I dont' think users would benefit from seeing to many items on one page.

This led me to look at our Code to Content Ratio. We have now managed to increase it from 9% to approx  18-22% on popular pages by getting rid of unnecessary code etc.

My question is , is there an ideal percentage the code to content ratio should be ?.. and what should I be aiming for ?

Also any other Panda 4.0 advice would also be appreciated

thanks

Sarah

[AlanMosley]

Egol as always gives a common sense answer.

I would not worry about a ratio, unless it is really bad. Search engines have a limit on how much of a page they will crawl, as there is no limit on how large a page may be, but unless you have a huge amount of code before content I would not be concerned.

From Bing
The page contains a large block of embedded script code. Search engines will ignore script code, but large quantities of script will force the actual text content of the page further down in the HTML. Since search engines may analyze only the first 100 KB of a page, it is possible that the script block may prevent search engines from indexing any page content.

[EGOL]

I would focus all of my effort on beefing up the thin content and getting rid of the duplicate content.

That will kick up your code to content ratio.

I don't think that reducing code is going to be nearly as helpful.