Homebuilders.com

Google has always been pretty forgiving when it comes to crawling and indexing webpages. We’ve never had to have HTML compliant webpages in order for Google to give us a number one ranking. However, Google has told us they are serious about keeping the Internet a super fast experience. Consequently, we need to be cognizant of things that slow our webpages down because the speeds at which our webpages load will affect how many pages Google indexes on our site.

Google’s recent implementations of Google caffeine and Google instant are now forcing us pay more attention to our site’s HTML compliance. Why you ask? Because a poorly written HTML page slows down the page load time.

Search engine bots arrive at your website with an algorithmically defined amount of time they can spend crawling through your site. Your site code can either cause the Googlebot to trudge through error after error, or cause the Googlebot to slide right on through the entire site.

Check out this Google Webmaster Tools crawl stats report:

Look at the highlighted areas. When the page load speed goes down, the number of pages crawled goes up. More pages crawled means more rankings for more terms.

One way to decrease the time the Googlebot spends downloading each of your webpages is to reduce the amount of code on each page.

This is where standards compliance comes in.

Many bot slowing obstacles are a result of code bloat. Things like:

Embedded and inline javascript;
Embedded and inline CSS;
On page use of tables;
On page use of attributes like font family, font size, font color, etc.;
On page use of style attributes.

When coders follow HTML standards, they tend to do away with all the inline and embedded code bloat. Inline javascript ends up in external .js files, inline CSS ends up in external .css files, and tables, font attributes, and style attributes are incorporated into external CSS files.

Removal of unnecessary on page code leads to a faster loading page. This type of streamlined code leads to an easier time on the Googlebot. When the Googlebot visits your website, it ignores javascript and CSS information located in include files and consequently spend less time on each page.

Even on small, simple sites, cleaner code can reduce file size of a typical page by up to 30-40%.

Want to check your site for code bloat?  Use the Firefox plugin ‘Firebug’, Google’s Page Speed Tester

I know it can be a pain to go back and re-code our webpages but as the competition for space increases, we will have to go the extra mile to be number one.

Happy coding…and re-coding.

Jim