I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. I’ve been hearing lately that Googlebot et al do not care about your code. They don’t care that you stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to get your sidebar to render correctly in IE, or that your brilliant CSS hack keeps Netscape 4 happy. They don’t care what DOCTYPE you use, or if you even have one for that matter. They don’t care that you scrapped the tables in favor of semantic div’s. They don’t even care that you took the time to ensure that every page on your site validates. They do not care. It’s time for change, brothers and sisters. Welcome to the revolution.
I’ve been getting a little irritated lately because of all the effort I put into my site for such small gains. The number one selling point of the CSS fanboys was the “code:content ratio.” And rightly so; they were definitely on to something. We chunked the <table>’s and <tr>’s and <td>’s en masse, swearing on our honor that we’d code properly from now on. But what did we trade those for? <div class="content"> <div class="wrapper"> <div class="post"> <div class="row"> <span class="left"> … I don’t see where we’ve gained anything. We still have tag soup.
I mentioned earlier that the bots don’t care about your code. Well, that’s almost true. Some bots do give preference to structural markup that flows well and follows the rules. But there’s still the code-to-content ratio. There’s no getting around it. That one thing holds 51% of the vote. Sure, all of the other factors add up to a lot, but without content you still lose. Enter the experiment. I’m going to be blogging on a different site for a while. It’s a subdomain of this one. I’m calling the site “Text Area,” after the HTML tag. (Ironic, really.) The point of the experiment is to see what kind of traffic I can generate using markup that would make any self-respecting webmaster vomit. My current template has a grand total of fourteen tags. There are no paragraphs; only line breaks. I don’t want anything that could be construed to resemble valid code. There will be bucket loads of content versus those fourteen tags, though, and I’ll even throw in a site map for free. I’m going to give it a few months to pick up enough steam to see if my theory is correct, and after that I’ll post my findings here.
~Jonathan
Update
Despite total and wanton disregard for standards, Text Area was a success. In fact, even when I ditched HTML altogether in favor of pure text files, Google still indexed the site. Granted, “googlebot” didn’t get very far in that case, but it still worked.
I haven’t abandoned standards; far from it. This experiment made me further embrace standards. It also gave me a great idea for making a site with minimal fluff and ultra-lean code. With what I found out during this experiment, I’ve made my new theme: Minima Code Block. Check it out.
Burn this feed.
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