During yesterday’s Crawling and Indexing Q&A with Google, the question was raised about whether code (actual code on the page) to text (the text content) ratio has any impact on Google’s rankings.
It is something that people periodically bringing up with regards to SEO. And compounding the issue that it is potentially important is that some various SEO tools flag code to text ratios as problematic for Google SEO, usually flagging when it sees the text percentage of the ratio isn’t high enough. But as we have learned, word count is not directly related to quality.
But John Mueller from Google answered the question quite succinctly… “No.”
Now, the direct “No” to this isn’t that surprising. But the signs of a high code ratio can hint at other related issues, even if Google isn’t specifically looking at the text to code ratio from a ranking perspective.
Bloated code or unneeded third party calls (such as for external javascript) can impact a site’s speed and it if it is excessively slow, it can affect ranking – not to mention the overall user experience on the page or site. And a high code ratio can sometimes reveal pages where there could be speed issues. So it is always smart to ensure your site is as fast as possible, something you can check with Google’s page speed tool.
So while it is worth streamlining code for page speed, optimizing for a specific code to text ratio is not needed.
Jennifer Slegg
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