Code to Content Ratios and SEO (Part Two)

In our last post, we talked about the way rumors and bankrupt theories can linger in the world of search engine optimization.  As an example of that kind of bad advice that’s easy to find, we isolated the idea that a page’s content to code ratio would impact its search engine performance.

Here are a few reasons why this oft-repeated idea shouldn’t influence your approach to SEO.

First, it sells search engine spiders short.  The underlying theory is that the bots won’t be able to find and index your content if it’s hidden within a pile of code.  That’s not true.  The search engines can parse the content from the surrounding HTML, so long as your not using “robots” instructions that explicitly tell the search engines to stay out.  If it’s written your pages, the engines can find it.

Second, the content to code theory has been dismissed by the folks at the search engines themselves.  A few years ago a Google employee nixed the idea in an interview.  Recently, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst mocked the idea of the content to code ratio outright, claiming that the answer was “42″ in an homage to the comedic sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The people on the inside don’t take the concept seriously and maintaint that webmasters should “[s]tay reasonable, make pages for your users and things will usually fall into place.”

Third, it’s hard to screw up code so badly that it would somehow garble the underlying content.  That’s particularly true today in a world driven by search engine friendly content management systems and CSS.  Even the old school HTML hand-coders, however, would have to really go crazy to create a code-heavy situation that would foil the search engines.  As Richard Tretheway noted:

Its only when pages are run through some WYSIWYG editors so many times that the code starts to get completely mangled that you might be able to say the code size has any impact. As far as I can see, the content of a page and the mark-up employed have a significant impact on rankings, but not the ratio of text to mark-up. Good luck!

Maybe there was a time in which search engines would wrestle comlicated code and lose.  There may have been a point in history where really light code was the only way to insure indexing and effective SEO.  If that was ever the case, though, those days are long past us.

If someone tells you that change in the ration between code and contet is a determining SEO factor, don’t believe them for a second.