Text-to-HTML ratio (also code-to-text ratio) is the share of a page’s HTML that is visible text. Many SEO tools calculate it as a percentage and flag low values as a warning.
What does Google say?
According to reports, including Search Engine Journal, Google’s John Mueller said in a 2018 office-hours hangout that the ratio is not a ranking factor. Google names no threshold above which a page ranks better or worse. The ranges that tool vendors publish come without evidence.
The figure can hint at something else. A very small text share may point to heavy inline scripts or styles that make the page large and slow to load. Page size and load time are then the topics to look at.
Calculation and example
ratio = text size / HTML size x 100
A page with 80 KB of HTML and 8 KB of visible text has a ratio of 10 percent. The number says nothing about the quality of the text. A short contact page with clean HTML scores as low as an article with bloated markup.
FAQ
What does a low ratio mean? The text is small compared to the code. Page size and load time show whether that is a problem.
How can I check it? With free checkers that take a URL, or by dividing text length by HTML size.
Sources
- Is code-to-text ratio a ranking factor? – Search Engine Journal (secondary)searchenginejournal.com
- Text to HTML ratio – SiteGuru (secondary)siteguru.co
- Are text to HTML ratios important? – WooRank (secondary)woorank.com
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