Over the past few months, I have been watching the recent anti-spam updates from Google very closely. I have noticed a particular trend in the search ranking algorithms that I wanted to make you all aware of; I’m referring to Google’s, “code to plain text ratio”.
Think of it like this: You have a webpage that has thousands of lines of code, but only 2 lines of text rich plain text in it. These kinds of pages are being severely punished by Google.
In a typical experiment that I would conduct by having a web page that has a simple <html>,<head>,<body> structure with no hidden lines of code in it, just pure text. It consistently outranked pages that had hundreds of lines of unreadable to the human eye code in it.
You might have dynamic content on your website that doesn’t change unless a link or box is clicked, which triggers text to be displayed. These types of pages are exactly what Google is seeking to punish. Have a look at the top high ranking e-commerce websites like Amazon and Ebay – one thing that they all have in common is the pages layout. You will notice that they are jammed packed with text content. There is no hidden text to be seen, no fancy click and display javascripts, in fact they are almost laughably simple. One long, giant list of plan text which in 95% of the time, outranks all of their competitors.
Keep it simple, and try to stay fancy applet free for as many of your websites functions as possible.