How does the toolbar caclulate text to code ratio?

[EHR]

I am seeing some very weird text to code ratios on a competitor site (over 100%) through the Analyze feature on the SEOmoz toolbar. I'm wondering how that's calculated, and what my competitors might be doing to raise that ratio so high artificially.

I need to turn in a report on this soon, any help is greatly appreciated!!

EHR

[AaronWheeler]

Hey Ryan! That's definitely weird. This is more of a customer service question than an SEO question, so I'm going to close this Q&A and open a customer service ticket for you at the email address associated with your account so I can do some research and get back to you. In the future, if you have a question about our site or tools, please email it to help@seomoz.org to get faster service. Thank you! Talk to you soon!

[RyanKent]

Hi Aaron.

Your explanation makes perfect sense, but I seem to be missing something. The below page shows over a 200% text to code ratio: http://www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plumbing/radiators/cat830960

The thing is, the page has very little text. Can you help me understand how the tool is working on this page?

[AaronWheeler]

Hey EHR!

The text to code ratio is actually as it sounds: the number of text characters divided by the number of code characters. So, if there are 200 characters in your text, but 1000 in your code, you would have a ratio of 20%. However, if you have 1000 text characters, but only 200 code characters, you would have a ratio of 500%. It's not common, but it does happen (especially on a text-heavy site like Amazon). I hope that helps! Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Cheers!

[EHR]

Any ideas on this post? Trying to figure out why Amazon's pages have such an artificially high text to code ratio.

Thanks!

EHR

[EHR]

It happens on several Amazon pages, listed below. In other tools the numbers are more normal, it's only with the SEOmoz toolbar that we get these aberrations.

80% - http://www.amazon.com/Happy-Birthday-Barbie-Princess-Doll/dp/B002UHJUUM

125% - http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Generation-without-iPhone-Software-Previous/dp/B001FA1NZK

119% - http://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-33966-6-Quart-Programmable/dp/B000GHGKXS

Thanks for your help!

EHR

[DanDeceuster]

I've never heard of this happening, almost every time I have used the analyze feature I get between 20% and 40% on the text to code ration. Can you post the URL of the page that is showing over 100% so we can take a look at what might be causing this?

From a technical perspective, this ration is simply determined by comparing the number of characters in text to the number of characters not in text. You can never have a 100% simply by virtue of a section. Google for another free text to code ratio tool and see what it says for the page in question too.