Blank Lines in Code Detrimental to SEO?
Can blank lines in your code affect your SEO efforts?
I’m always looking at websites and monitoring potential “competition” to my employer’s growing business. Today, I come across a marketing agency that offers SEO services along with a “proprietary content management system.” Now, there are plenty of capable open-source content management systems, and some very capable, well developed commercial solutions. Usually, one or the other serves the purposes of companies and nonprofits alike. Any proprietary solution as part of a marketing team would need a closer look. Who is the developer? How often are updates made and how simple is it to modify things? And amongst many other questions, what type of code does it create? Is it valid code?
This agency uses the CMS for their own website as well as the clients who need a new CMS. Being a curious person, I took a peak under the hood at the resulting code. I was surprised to see massive numbers of blank lines of code! The code had over 3800 lines, and at one point, there was a gap of 2000+ blank lines. When I removed the blank lines, I was able to get the code down to an even 600 lines, and I probably could’ve pushed it into fewer than that.
Now, I’ve been through an SEO course (or three), and do this stuff for my employer all of the time, and we always encourage proper structure of code, including minimizing code bloat and excessive blank lines. But never, have I come across documentation that says a spider won’t read blank lines or that poorly constructed HTML code will affect your SEO efforts. Flash, Javascript, and forms may (and DO!) cause issues, but I’m talking plain HTML without that stuff.
So I reached out to some industry colleagues to ask them, “Have you ever found evidence or read anything that says the length of code affects spiderability and SEO efforts? I’m referring to massive amounts of blank lines.”
Response? No evidence, and no documentation, but it can’t be a good idea. Spiders can be programmed in different ways, and because we’re not the search engine spiders, we can only guess what a search engine spider might do. It’s possible that when a spider comes across a slew of blank lines, that it may be programmed to stop or give up. And why risk what we don’t know for sure? Best bet: Reduce the code and don’t give the spider a reason to stop moving about your pages.
Who is Jane Hambleton?
Prior to January 8, 2008, a blog search on Google would not have yielded any non-spam results for Jane Hambleton. In the three days since then, she’s had 400 or more blog posts that address her directly.
The Google News results are similar. Nothing notable at all prior to January 8, 2008. Since then, over 150 articles have been written about her.
How’d it all start? Jane Hambleton, first described as a disc jockey in local papers, and later self-described on national television as a copywriter, Jane wrote less than 50 words to sell a car she had in her possession.
The ad read as follows:
OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.
And where did she advertise these words? Not on a billboard, not as part of a massive marketing campaign, and not exclaimed over loud speakers to a large live audience. Ms. Hambleton posted a classified ad in the Des Moines Register newspaper.
If good copywriting isn’t part of your marketing mix, it certainly should be. Just look at the results!
