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Is Bloated Code Jacking Up Your SEO?  By
Stoney deGeyter
There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don't really care. It doesn't matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code "clean" or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot. Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes: • Errors that prevent search engines from properly spidering your pages • An extremely high code to content ratio • Placement of content within the code structure • Over-burdensome code creating longer-than-usual download time These are pretty much simplifications of the complexities of how the search engine algorithms work but this will help us better understand the problems that arise from junking up your code. Let's look at each of these individually. Errors that prevent search engines from properly spidering your pages I'm a huge proponent of using proper HTML markup and validating your code. No, there is no search engine ranking benefit from having valid code vs. invalid code. But some invalid code can cause problems with the search engines.
Browsers tend to be very forgiving of these kinds of coding errors but the search engines may not be. For example, if you forget to close your <head> tag the search engines may not take your body copy into consideration, not knowing that it's actual content. There are numerous coding errors that can essentially stop the spiders from grabbing, indexing and evaluating your copy properly. By using validated code you are 100% certain to eliminate these kinds of potential problems. Should you worry about all the other little things, like making sure each image has an ALT attribute? I say yes. Not because those things will trip up the search engines but because by validating your code completely, it makes it easier to find new validation issues that may appear with re-designs and site changes. Such new errors can easily be hidden among the "acceptable" coding errors if they are not all attended to up front. An extremely high code to content ratio I'm not obsessive about code-to-content ratios but I do believe that if you have so much code on your pages that it makes it hard to dig out the content then you might have some issues. Especially when you have hundreds or thousands of lines of code with very little accommodating content. I'm not suggesting the search engines won't be able to parse the code and pull the content out, they will, but each engine has a limit as to how much data they will download per page. If they reach that point before finding your content then they won't get the content at all. Continue reading this article.
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