This week in SEO advice:

Pareto principle is also referred to as the 80-20 rule. It says that 80 percent of your effects will come from 20 percent of the efforts.

I tend to find this applies to SEO as well. 80% of what most people do to be more SEO-friendly generally doesn't help as much as that 20%. That 20% that leads to 80%, in my opinion, consists of:

- Quality content / Keywords

- Freshness

- Site speed

- Link Building / Notoriety

 

The 80% that leads to 20% consists of:

- Nitpicking over Meta Tags

- Making that image that says "Search" text so the word "Search" appears in your HTML (Anyone ever recommends that to you, run for the hills. You will never win the keyword "Search")

- Stripping out extra whitespace

- most of the "HTML optimizations" SEOs pitch

 

So when you spend your programmers man hours, running up tons of man hours on things like stripping extra whitespace out, realize that for the same price or lower, you could have gotten someone to do a few man hours of link building or copy writing that would have driven much more of your traffic.

 

So I tend to do a lot of SEO consulting. Mainly from the technical side of things. So I'll share with you a lesson now and again.

Today's lesson: Crawlers don't care about whitespace.

I recently heard from a client that their SEO expert said we need to strip out all unnecessary whitespace from the HTML. Newlines, tabs, all of it. Apparently the whitespace we put into the HTML to make it readable was destroying their PageRank or something like that. I tried to understand how in the world that made sense. Apparently, the people writing all these search engine crawlers and parsers are idiots and were unable to figure out how to make their bots skip over whitespace. The billions of dollars search companies have spent to improve their analyzers of your HTML code, and they overlooked skipping over extra whitespace?!? Sheesh. The ONLY way removing whitespace would help is if you weren't compressing your pages anyway. Then you have bigger problems then whitespace.
Here's a little experiment. I downloaded the clients homepage, which has a hefty amount of HTML and whitespace.
Uncompressed filesize: 106KB. Yeah, that's quite a bit.
Stripping out all \n and \t: 104KB. Not a big difference.
Condense all \s+ into " ": 75KB. Now we see a bigger jump. But wait...
Gzipped 106KB file: 13KB
Gzipped 75KB file: 12KB. Not a significant difference in my mind.

Search engines crawlers and parsers care little about whitespace. How do I know this? Because browsers care little about whitespace. The only thing you will do is shave MAYBE a kilobyte off your filesize, which in the grand scheme of SEO things, is completely minor and insignificant.