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
-
Subdomain or Country Code Top Level Domain
Hello Friends, I am planning to develop my website for other languages. which one is best for SEO? (The main English website is well ranked in google) 1. de.example.com (subdomain may obtain rank faster as it is part of the main website?)
Web Design | | Bold
2. example.de (this is a completely new one; so not easy to get rank?) thank you
Barsbold0 -
Will numbers & data be considered as user generated content by Google OR naturally written text sentences only refer to user generated content.
Hi, Will numbers & data be considered as user generated content by Google OR naturally written text sentences only refer to user generated content. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
How to know if a wordpress theme is coded correctly for Seo
Hi, So I am curious if there is a tool to see if a site is coed properly for Google? I am running Avada, a standalone theme, yet I am also using a cache plugin. But when I search my code, its all like on one huge line. So I am curious if there is a way to verify or check if a theme is coded correctly? Thank you
Web Design | | Berner1 -
Is there a best practice for using a general iso code for the EAME region and APAC region or should you break it out by country?
I am creating a strategy for multiple regions and the US comes to market different than EAME (Europe, Africa, Middle East) and China. We were planning on using language and iso codes in subfolder's but the corporation only wants their content to be in German, English, and Queens English. Our current decision is to use /en-US/, /en/, /de/, /en-CN/, /zh-CN/. /en/ and /de/ will be what we use for EAME. This doesn't seem like the best idea as I think /en/ will get indexed as the US version and not the EAME version. Any suggestion or if clarification is needed is greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | GodfreyB2B0 -
Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?
Hi, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic. Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy. Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want! The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again. An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2 With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at. I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!? I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link. What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble! My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this? And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery? Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated, Thanks Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
Using More Info javascript:toggleDisplay tag for More info text
Is there any harm in using javascript so a user can "toggle" open or closed additional text on a website? For example, if a user wants to read more about something, they can click on "More Info" and the text would then appear. Google is able to read the text, because I chose a random 8 word section of the text within the More Info and pasted it into a Google Search and the website showed up in search results. Just wondering if using this technique would have any negative impact. Here's what the code would look like:
Web Design | | EEE3
<a <span="">title</a><a <span="">="Show Tables" href="</a><a class=" " target="_blank">javascript:toggleDisplay('table1')</a>">More Info style="display: none;" id="table1"> this is where the text would be, and from this section was where I grabbed text to search with in google. Then in the footer, here is the script needed so the more info will work: I am by no means an expert in coding/html/javascript. Thanks!0 -
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 -
PSD to WP Coding & Plugin Implementation?
Any recommendations? I am looking for a company that can do it to a very high standard. Need a review plugin implemented as well, which works with the theme. Clean coding, correctly named divs and clean comments. Thanks guys
Web Design | | getbigyadig0