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.
January 24th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Its one of those things … if it does impact the algorithm, it would be fractions of a percent. Very Minimal! That said … it would be easy enough to test