Text to Code Ratio & SEO
-
Hi
Has anyone had experience of updating their text to code ratio if its too high & whether this has much impact on SEO performance?
I am trying to prioritise tasks & wondered if this is something which should be higher on my list.
Thank you
-
Brilliant thank you I always get this flagged in my audits & just wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything.
-
The old "text to code ratio" thing was always a myth, Becky, but it keeps popping up periodically.
I asked John Mueller of Google about it directly during a Crawling and Indexing Hangout and his answer was unequivocal, short and sweet:
Paul: Followup to the code density question - does code to text ratio make any difference for ranking?
John Mueller> Paul Thompson: No.
Paul Thompson> John Mueller: Much appreciated. Have been railing against this idea for so long, but folks making this claim keep popping up regularly
Here's the page with the actual comment exchange. Good video in general on crawling/indexing questions.
So - straight from the horse's mouth.
Paul
-
Yes I've only used schema and this was implemented before my time, so I may change the code
Thanks
-
Ah really? That's not good!
Personally I use Schema so can only really comment on that - someone else might have more of a view.
-Andy
-
Ok great, our dev team have messed our schema up so I need to sort this out
Is there a preference over data-vocab vs. schema?
Thanks!
-
I would defiantly be adding schema because there are many benefits to showing Google exactly what is what.
I have seen sites where there has been no change in search positions, and others where there have, but this could as well be about a page being more visible in Google and as such, getting more traffic and eventually a boost from Google as they realise it is a popular result.
Done right, there is no negative to adding Schema
-Andy
-
Great thank you, we're trying to add more content to things like product/category pages but getting the balance is sometimes hard.
I think I have about 600 pages being flagged as having a low text to code ratio, but just wanted to make sure I am focusing on my top priorities when it comes to ranking factors
What do you think about schema? I read that it wasn't a ranking signal. but then saw it's included in the periodic table of seo success signals, under 'do your pages use structured data to enhance listings?
Thanks
-
Hi Becky,
I have never seen a case where this actually makes a difference. However, I have found code issues because of it, but again, nothing that impacted SEO.
I guess that if a page is really large, then this can slow things down - that can impact SEO, but outside of this, I wouldn't be worrying about it.
Just keep an eye on any 'thin' pages that might pop up as a result of seeing these.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Javascript and SEO
I've done a bit of reading and I'm having difficulty grasping it. Can someone explain it to me in simple language? What I've gotten so far: Javascript can block search engine bots from fully rendering your website. If bots are unable to render your website, it may not be able to see important content and discount these content from their index. To know if bots could render your site, check the following: Google Search Console Fetch and Render Turn off Javascript on your browser and see if there are any site elements shown or did some disappear Use an online tool Technical SEO Fetch and Render Screaming Frog's Rendered Page GTMetrix results: if it has a Defer parsing of Javascript as a recommendation, that means there are elements being blocked from rendering (???) Using our own site as an example, I ran our site through all the tests listed above. Results: Google Search Console: Rendered only the header image and text. Anything below wasn't rendered. The resources googlebot couldn't reach include Google Ad Services, Facebook, Twitter, Our Call Tracker and Sumo. All "Low" or blank severity. Turn off Javascript: Shows only the logo and navigation menu. Anything below didn't render/appear. Technical SEO Fetch and Render: Our page rendered fully on Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile. Screaming Frog: The Rendered Page tab is blank. It says 'No Data'. GTMetrix Results: Defer parsing of JavaScript was recommended. From all these results and across all the tools I used, how do I know what needs fixing? Some tests didn't render our site fully while some did. With varying results, I'm not sure where to from here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez1 -
Adding Video to Landing Pages-Beneficial SEO Effect in Terms of Links & Visitor Engagement?
I run a New York City commercial real estate in New York City. Lately, I have started to produce 30-second videos about property listings and neighborhoods. I have noticed that the engagement for these videos on Facebook is much higher that for text posts. Should adding these videos on our website (hosting them on Youtube) result in increased visitor engagement? Could there be a positive SEO effect such as more links and higher quality links? Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
Anchor Text to Content Ratio
My Home Page has about 500 words of content, but when I crawl the text it brings up about 1400 total words when counting all the anchor text links (I believe all are in the navigation or images). All of the link are internal and relevant (it's a huge site), but I am worried that they are diluting the copy. Is that likely the case? What's a good ratio? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanArizona0 -
PRweb & PRnewswire
Hi Guys, Looking for thoughts on press release websites in terms of link value. Recent press releases on both these sites have recently appeared in OSE with DA's of 93/98 and PA's of 47/48 - great stuff. Given we can control anchor text and include links these are great opportunities to combine anchor text vs branded links, include citation and co-citations all from within the main body of the release too depending on the PR package you subscribe to. So are these link opps as valuable as they appear or could they be devalued based on the fact they are sat on these PR sites? Might Google view them as no more important than links from ezinearticles? Are they frowned on even more as they might be considered paid links? Further to this, if they aren't as high value as their DA/PA suggests then might an extra filter in OSE to account for this be useful? Interested to hear your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovealbatross
Cheers
James0 -
International SEO and server hosting
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites. Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others). So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites. We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh-riley0 -
Changing Servers + Effect on SEO
Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan160 -
.htaccess code ?
What is the code to redirect www.xyz.com/abc where abc is a folder to www.xyz.com/abc.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050