Code vs content

Many of you know what this is but if not:

What is the Code to Text Ratio
The Code to Text Ratio represents the percentage of actual text in a web page. Our content ratio tool extracts the text from paragraphs and the anchor text from HTML code and calculates the content ratio based on this information.

Why is the Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?
The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.

Check your board here: Code to Text Ratio - SEO Tools - Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization I got 18.29 %

Forums generally have low C/T ratio. Has anyone tried to change things in the code to make it higher? What did you change?

My forum home page:

Results for: FireBlades.org
Web Page Size :
112469 Bytes = 110 KB

Code Size :
88697 Bytes = 87 KB

Text Size :
23772 Bytes = 23 KB


Code to Text Ratio : 21.14 %

They seem to be describing their ratio backwards.

It should be "content to code" or "text to code" NOT "code to text".

FYI Our Cleanup HTML code? feature is designed to boost the "content to code" (C2C) ratio.

I've always been in the low code to content for seo camp but am wavering on it recently.

I asked Matt Cutts a question about why would the duplicate content of a vBulletin archive page outrank a regular thread and he quickly said it would not have anything to do with the different code to text/content ratio. He indicated the archive was probably outranking the thread due to a difference in PR distribution and/or differences in semantic markup.

From that very direct response and from keeping my eyes open, I believe that Google has devalued the code to text/content component of their algo as compared to what it used to be. And it really doesn't surprise me that they would move in that direction. A better ratio may be convenient for googlebot but it's usually got nothing to do with how relevant a page is to a search. I'm still gonna try to reduce the code on pages but I don't expect much (if any) seo benefit from simple improving the code to text/content ratio.

OTOH, there are plenty of other reasons that I want to reduce the amount of code bloat in my pages. I am very much looking forward to vbseo releasing their new templates and I plan to implement them if they do as good a job as I expect they'll do.

Anyone else want to weigh in on the importance of code to text/content *specifically* with regard to seo ?

Good luck, Ross

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

They seem to be describing their ratio backwards.

It should be "content to code" or "text to code" NOT "code to text".

FYI Our Cleanup HTML code? feature is designed to boost the "content to code" (C2C) ratio.

Just tried it with the cleanup off, i got: 16.84 % so a difference of 1,45% .

I think Ross has a point about ranking, most high ranked sites have low C2C.

Originally Posted by rmjvol

I asked Matt Cutts a question about why would the duplicate content of a vBulletin archive page outrank a regular thread and he quickly said it would not have anything to do with the different code to text/content ratio. He indicated the archive was probably outranking the thread due to a difference in PR distribution and/or differences in semantic markup.

Very interesting.

Results for: Hondaswap Web Page Size :
90253 Bytes = 88 KB

Code Size :
73598 Bytes = 72 KB

Text Size :
16655 Bytes = 16 KB


Code to Text Ratio : 18.45 %



Results for: SkeyMedia Web Page Size :
43660 Bytes = 43 KB

Code Size :
20220 Bytes = 20 KB

Text Size :
23440 Bytes = 23 KB


Code to Text Ratio : 53.69 %



Results for: The Connecticut Forums -> CTForums.com Web Page Size :
67248 Bytes = 66 KB

Code Size :
56604 Bytes = 55 KB

Text Size :
10644 Bytes = 10 KB


Code to Text Ratio : 15.83 %



forums suck :P my blog is doing pretty dang good though :P

Results for: Ayyas

Web Page Size :
67060 Bytes = 65 KB

Code Size :
61590 Bytes = 60 KB

Text Size :
5470 Bytes = 5 KB


Code to Text Ratio : 8.16 %