Laundering Your Web Code
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 8:37 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
There seems to be a few differences of opinion on whether the code in the back-end of web-pages needs to be squeaky clean.
If you use Microsoft Word or FrontPage (like I do) to write your blog posts, you know that a lot of garbage is carried over when you copy and paste this information into your post.
In fact, there is so much extra code in some cases that when you paste it into Wordpress, it becomes a terrible mess! Cleaning up this code can take a lot of time - but is it worth it?
I read one report that said crawlers only read 150-250 words of a page, so if those words are filled with extra code, the crawler may not find the information you intended to be indexed. That being said, it seems like it would be beneficial to have less code in the back-end of your pages.
But not so fast!
WebProNews did an interview on this subject with Google’s own Vanessa Fox, in a nutshell, here’s her statement:
Code to text ratio!
This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say - it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio.
So, was all that time I spent cleaning up my code wasted? My opinion; I don’t think so.
While Google currently accepts the dirty code that is input with some word processing software, I do not.
Cleaning up the code makes it a LOT easier to make updates in the future. Plus, we all know how Google likes to make changes. I’m not going to be the one that has to go through hundreds of web-pages and try to clean them up if Google ever changes their mind. I’d much rather do it “right” the first time!
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