How does the toolbar caclulate text to code ratio?
-
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
-
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!
-
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?
-
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!
-
Any ideas on this post? Trying to figure out why Amazon's pages have such an artificially high text to code ratio.
Thanks!
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
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple sites using same text - how to avoid Google duplicate content penalty?
Hi Mozers, my client located in Colorado is opening a similar (but not identical) clinic in California. Will Google penalize the new California site if we use text from our website that features his Colorado office? He runs the clinic in CO and will be a partner of the clinic in CA, so the CA clinic has his "permission" to use his original text. Eventually he hopes to go national, with multiple sites utilizing essentially the same text. Will Google penalize the new CA site for plagiarism and/or duplicate content? Or is there a way to tell Google, "hey Google, this new clinic is not ripping off my text"?
Web Design | | CalamityJane770 -
Will numbers & data be considered as user generated content by Google OR naturally written text sentences only refer to user generated content.
Hi, Will numbers & data be considered as user generated content by Google OR naturally written text sentences only refer to user generated content. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Requirements for mobile menu design have created a duplicated menu in the text/cache view.
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1 Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO. With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz. Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version. Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax. what do you guys think? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | TrinityPower0 -
Does anyone know how to find functions/codes/etc in WordPress?
Right now, I'm working on solving a relatively easy WP issue (easy, because someone told me what to do. Thanks iNetSeo). I have to replace: <span class="post_date"></span class="post_date"> and replace it with <span class="post_date date="" updated"=""></span class="post_date> But, I can't find the "_<span class="post_date">"</span class="post_date">_For a number of my WP problems, the hardest part is just located the code/function/markup I need to replace. Does anyone know where this might usually be stored on a website? Also, does anyone know if there's any tool that would allowed to just put "various function" in a search box, and wordpress take you to where it was on the backend of your site, so you could edit it? I included a screenshot of our editors, but I already opened them all, pasted the code in Ctrl-F to no avail, but maybe I missed something. Thanks for helping with my frustrating scavenger hunt! Ruben ASTPPfA
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
Web development - License CSS/Markup/Code
In development of a website, is it typical for the developer to retain rights to the CSS, Markup and other Coding? If so, why is this done?
Web Design | | DemiGR0 -
Testing your code and site
I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
How to make Address Text Clickable for Google Map Link for Mobile Device
How do I make the address text on the site a clickable link for mobile devices?
Web Design | | bozzie3110