Does a page with “lean” code beat a page with “bloated” code? Should you be looking into your page's code and make sure they are clean?
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Does a page with a lean code beat a page with a bloated code?
So the idea is, as soon as you jump into technical SEO, you start to see some beautifully organized and well-written pages that are just the code that is needed and you would see other pages that are just lines and lines of code. The idea is, does that matter? Does Google care about that? These are one of the things that kind of make sense from an anecdotal level.
Google has to crawl through all these anyway, it would probably prefer not to do that if it didn’t have to and so, what we were trying to do in this situation was to create identical pages, content wise, and the only difference between them is the bloated code page has superfluous code – things that aren’t needed and are just there to be there.
The bloated code was placed in the third spot with the idea that if it is a ranking factor, it will drop because all the other pages are lean. In the end, it dropped. It was pretty surprising. When you are doing an audit for a client, this is the kind of thing that you could work into it. Identify points that your developer can fix. This will distinguish you in your audits compared to your competitors. You will be able to provide a unique package to your client that is good for the site.
What if you don't have a developer, where can you check to see if your code is getting bloated or not?
At this point, I do not have a tool where I can plug and go in. What I have done before was look at html and css errors and now I’m getting back to that. Not that html and css errors are what Google is measuring here but what I found is that, sites that has a lot of html and css errors also have a lot of other problems.
That is, kind of a starting point. So, what I put into my audits is I used to highlight html and css errors and I still do but now I do it from the perspective of you need to have your developer look at these errors and see if there are other extra div tags, pieces of codes that are not necessary.
So, my thought process there is html and css and high quantity errors are symptomatic of other things and so what I use for that is the W3C Validator for that to go in and see those errors. That is the first thing I do to implement it.
Do you just point out the errors or do you try to fix them yourself also?
In my audits, when I find things that are fixable, I have my developer price them and I add my magin on top of that and then I tell the client the cost if they want me to fix them. If they have their own developer to do that for them, I am happy for them to do it. That gives them the option.