Location of Content within the Code Structure
-
Hi guys,
When working with advanced modern websites it many times means that in order to achieve the look and feel we end up with pages that has almost 1000 lines of code or more. In some cases it is impossible to avoid it if we are to reach the Client's visual and technical specifications.Say the page is 1000 lines of code, and our content only starts at line 450 onwards, will that have an impact from a Google crawlability, hence affect our SEO making it harder to rank?
Thoughts?
Dan.
-
Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code.
I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do.
If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site.
Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test.
All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.
-
if you have a high html/content rate, the google robot will need less time to crawl your site content.
In my opinion is an important SEO on page factor that´s why i´m always trying to:
-
avoid javascript inlines
-
have a clean & simple HTML code
-
optimize the code deleting unnecesary characters like spaces.
Last december, I changed my wordpress theme to one with a better/clean code, after 4/5 weeks I improve considerably my rankings, coincidence? I don´t think so
Br
//Oliver
-
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
-
Page content not being recognised?
I moved my website from Wix to Wordpress in May 2018. Since then, it's disappeared from Google searches. The site and pages are indexed, but no longer ranking. I've just started a Moz campaign, and most pages are being flagged as having "thin content" (50 words or less), when I know that there are 300+ words on most of the pages. Looking at the page source I find this bit of code: page contents Does this mean that Google is finding this and thinks that I have only two words (page contents) on the page? Or is this code to grab the page contents from somewhere else in the code? I'm completely lost with this and would appreciate any insight.
Technical SEO | | Photowife1 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
Duplicate content in Magento
Hi all We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing. For example: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page. Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess? Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Duplicate Content on Multinational Sites?
Hi SEOmozers Tried finding a solution to this all morning but can't, so just going to spell it out and hope someone can help me! Pretty simple, my client has one site www.domain.com. UK-hosted and targeting the UK market. They want to launch www.domain.us, US-hosted and targeting the US market. They don't want to set up a simple redirect because a) the .com is UK-hosted b) there's a number of regional spelling changes that need to be made However, most of the content on domain.com applies to the US market and they want to copy it onto the new website. Are there ways to get around any duplicate content issues that will arise here? Or is the only answer to simply create completely unique content for the new site? Any help much appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Coolpink0 -
If I 301 re-direct a piece of content (A) to another piece of content (B) and B is unrelated in subject matter to A, will the referring search keywords to content piece A hold for content piece B?
For example, I have a piece of content about furniture and it ranks in top 5 in the SERPs for the phrase "furniture". If I were to 301 redirect that piece of furniture content to a piece of content about trucks, would the referring keyword "furniture" continue to rank over time for the trucks content? My instincts tell me that in the short term the content piece about trucks would receive traffic for the term "furniture", but over the long term, the trucks content would lose rankings for the term "furniture" since the piece has to do with trucks and not furniture. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | pbrothers240 -
How do you properly handle syndicated content?
The same piece of content is pulled in and presented (syndicated) within a frame on different web sites (owned by the same company). However, I would like only one web site to rank on Google's search results for that content. How do I set this up? Thanks, claudia
Technical SEO | | claudmar0 -
Site Structure question
when deciding the Site structure for a e-commerce site Is it better to keep everything mysite.com/widget.html or use categories like mysite.com/Gifts/widget.html
Technical SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0