What is a good text / html ratio?

[johnMoss]

Obviously there is a definitive standard, I haven't found it. So the general question stands, what is considered an SEO healthy ratio, and more subjectively as follows;

a) All obvious givens aside, are non-html scripts being cataloged as html in this analysis as well? Perhaps another happy reason to go jquery over JS?

b) Kinda zeroing in on Google here, but is there possibly also a definitive point into the body tag that the bots will terminate indexing in the presence of accumulating low ratio? Really referring only to home page with this one, and bad mark-up as a trigger of its own is understood...

c) The presence of a good ratio seems to be quite important, even with the use of a site map. I'm querilous as to the value given this aspect, in that from a retail standpoint, too much information = buzz-kill. That said, slapping some informational prose toward the bottom wouldn't hurt, but, and even if, all manner of care has been taken to assuage technical rules, will the bots make it that far down the page of a 'non .org site' ?

[DWcourse]

I don't have any definitive data but my strong feeling is that this is a very minor factor. Although Google does consider page loading time.

[johnMoss]

I can't find any either, but there does seem to be a value ascribed to 'more informative' pages, which in the absence of manual scoring are assumedly derived by this ratio.

[DWcourse]

Search engines can base "more important" on any number of factors:

inbound links
clicks on the page from search results
time spent on page
keyword density
keywords in important text (headings, titile tag, etc.)
etc.

[johnMoss]

Definitely a slew of factors that come into play... I'm just zeroed in on this one at the moment because certain parties out there as one may come to find are implying it as an SEO component of low to medium merit. Yet there doesn't seem to be even a weighted opinion as to what 'officially' constitutes a good ratio, or if there is I haven't found it yet.

[DWcourse]

Just sayin' that text to html may be a very small direct factor or just something that influences other factors (like load time).

That said, I think external javascripts and style sheets are important (and cut down the code to content ratio. And using well constructed and concise html is important. I just don't think there is any kind of "desirable" code to content ratio. And it there was such a factor it would seem to favor long, text-heavy pages, minimally-formatted pages and I don't think that is the case.

[johnMoss]

That said, I think external javascripts

Extremely salient counsel... Hadn't thought about that!

[DWcourse]

Is that as in "Salient Green"

(please forgive the bad pun and obscure movie reference)

[johnMoss]

Ya know... I'm workin' it here... thinkin, thinkin... .and the best I can come up with is Soylent Sheen... pathetic i know, but charlie could play himself in the role...

[edbr]

i have often wondered on this .
IF google uses percentages to rank keyword as sailient ( i like that word too) the more content then the more times a keyword can be repeated and still acheive a percentage supposedly acceptable to google.
there is also some discussion about text to code, but that seems to be ok provided styles and javascript is off page
i agree probably low in inportance unless it helps keyword repitition with out penalty but for the first part i