code vs content ratio

[saha_m]

Is that more code (read html code) in a page impact search results? Anybody have success story in getting better results after moving to valid xhtml/css.

[mattur]

It's possibly a factor, in particular how much code a spider has to go through until it reaches the content. See Content Density Observation [webmasterworld.com] and search the site for other related threads.

But even if it isn't a significant factor for SEO, we all want our pages to be as fast as possible, so lean and mean code is the way to go; use CSS and javascript includes, etc.

It's also worth noting that an XHTML1.0 file will always use more code than an HTML4.01 page, so HTML 4.01 is the best choice in this respect. See also Why most of us should NOT use XHTML [webmasterworld.com]