How does the toolbar caclulate text to code ratio?
-
I am seeing some very weird text to code ratios on a competitor site (over 100%) through the Analyze feature on the SEOmoz toolbar. I'm wondering how that's calculated, and what my competitors might be doing to raise that ratio so high artificially.
I need to turn in a report on this soon, any help is greatly appreciated!!
EHR
-
Hey Ryan! That's definitely weird. This is more of a customer service question than an SEO question, so I'm going to close this Q&A and open a customer service ticket for you at the email address associated with your account so I can do some research and get back to you. In the future, if you have a question about our site or tools, please email it to help@seomoz.org to get faster service. Thank you! Talk to you soon!
-
Hi Aaron.
Your explanation makes perfect sense, but I seem to be missing something. The below page shows over a 200% text to code ratio: http://www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plumbing/radiators/cat830960
The thing is, the page has very little text. Can you help me understand how the tool is working on this page?
-
Hey EHR!
The text to code ratio is actually as it sounds: the number of text characters divided by the number of code characters. So, if there are 200 characters in your text, but 1000 in your code, you would have a ratio of 20%. However, if you have 1000 text characters, but only 200 code characters, you would have a ratio of 500%. It's not common, but it does happen (especially on a text-heavy site like Amazon). I hope that helps! Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Cheers!
-
Any ideas on this post? Trying to figure out why Amazon's pages have such an artificially high text to code ratio.
Thanks!
EHR
-
It happens on several Amazon pages, listed below. In other tools the numbers are more normal, it's only with the SEOmoz toolbar that we get these aberrations.
80% - http://www.amazon.com/Happy-Birthday-Barbie-Princess-Doll/dp/B002UHJUUM
125% - http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Generation-without-iPhone-Software-Previous/dp/B001FA1NZK
119% - http://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-33966-6-Quart-Programmable/dp/B000GHGKXS
Thanks for your help!
EHR
-
I've never heard of this happening, almost every time I have used the analyze feature I get between 20% and 40% on the text to code ration. Can you post the URL of the page that is showing over 100% so we can take a look at what might be causing this?
From a technical perspective, this ration is simply determined by comparing the number of characters in text to the number of characters not in text. You can never have a 100% simply by virtue of a section. Google for another free text to code ratio tool and see what it says for the page in question too.
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
-
Location of body text on page - at top or bottom - does it matter for SEO?
Hi - I'm just looking at the text on a redesigned homepage. They have moved all the text to the very bottom of the page (which is quite common with lots of designers, I notice - I usually battle to move the important text back up to the top). I have always ensured the important text comes at the top, to some extent - does it matter where on the page the text comes, for SEO? Are there any studies you can point me to? Thanks for your help, Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart1 -
Organization name as text vs. as a picture with alt text + Schema.org markup
I'm looking for some feedback to implement best practice for the markup of our header/navigation at the top of our site. Our organization name and a tag line is at the top of every page on the left, then our logo, then our navigation to items like "Topics" "FAQs" "About us" etc is to the right along the top. Our organization name includes the most frequently searched keyword for what we want to rank on, and our organization name is our domain name. A couple other background items: we're a non-profit startup and no code is public yet -- hence, I'll be explaining what we're going for. We're coding in straight html/css, not using Wordpress or anything like that. When we originally DIY coded our draft homepage and a few landing pages, we put the organization name and tag line into the markup as text, to look like this: Organization name | Pretty | Navigation items over here
Web Design | | scienceisrad
Explanatory fun tag line | Cool |
--------------------------------------- | Logo | --------------------------------------------------------- Then we outsourced the markup of two more landing pages to a company that does on-demand orders for responsive markup, based on png's we sent of the designs. The company's code renders a fabulous looking version of our design, and important for usability, it is responsive. The company also did something else I'm not so sure of. They made one big image out of our organization name, tag line and logo ... because? The indenting and different font sizes of the Organization name and tag line was too hard to code in? Or is it just best practice for html standards, SEO, etc. to make it one big logo?? Now, as part of an overall effort I'm working on to reconcile our different code ... I'm mulling right now specifically on reconciling the different approaches we each took and incorporating new best practices for the header ... based on what I'm reading online about headers, including debates about whether to use h1 for your company name, whether using an image for the name is fine, advice about including Schema.org markup for logos, etc. Given all this, which of these two options look better to you? Do they seem equally good to you? What would you change about the one that looks better to you? What do I have wrong in them? Or would you code this entirely differently to hit all best practices? What do you think about using h1 for organization name vs. is there a better tag to use for the organization name to code it in as text? (Note: we have other h1's on our pages for the actual article/content titles of each page, which maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't be having those as h1's?) Option 1 -- using text for our name and tag line: <header id="top" class="brandfont brandcolor">
[# Organization name Explanatory fun tag line](/) Organization name logo {navigation code here}
</header> Option 2 -- name, tag line and logo all as one big png image: <header id="header" class="container"> Organization name tag line {navigation code here}
</header>1 -
Hidden Text w/ Java Script _ Is it Bad?
Just came across an article that stated that Google is looking negatively at sites that attempt to hide text or use javascripts to expand text on websites. We are about to launch our new website and believe we are using this technique but im not certain if what we are doing will hurt us. Our website tends to be a little heavy on the text so used a "read more" scrpit that will expand when clicked on. Three sections that use this on the new website Take a look and let me know your thoughts http://joomplateshop.com/demos/catdi.com/
Web Design | | ChopperCharlie0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
Does google prefer expanded text to text that you have to mouse over to show?
Does a long scrolling page of text perform better than a page that has the content in sections that have to be moused over to be seen? Are there any articles or research on this?
Web Design | | SirSud0 -
Text in Images vs. Alt tags
Hi on my homepage i h ave multiple images They have the appropriate alt text for each image, but the text which the image displays is not written into the page and styled using CSS rather than placing text within an image. Is this a issue worth correcting, or is it sufficient to have just alt text for each image. Any major pros from having putting the text in the image into the CMS using appropriate CSS styling to achieve the same effect.
Web Design | | monster990 -
Facebook code being duplicated? (Any developers mind taking a peek?)
I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Testing your code and site
I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0