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At work, we have a dedicated SEO Analyst who's job is to pour over lots of data (KeyNote/Compete etc) and generate up fancy reports for the executives so they can see how we are doing against our competitors in organic search ranking. He also leads initiatives to improve the SEO rankings on our sites by optimizing things as best we can.
We also have a longstanding mission to decrease our page load time, which right now is pretty shoddy on some pages.
The SEO guy mentioned that semantic, valid HTML gets more points by crawlers than jumbled messy HTML. I've been working on a real time HTML compressor that will decrease our page sizes my a pretty good chunk. Will compressing the HTML hurt us in site rankings?
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It should be noted that speed is a minor factor in SEO. And once you're using gzip, minifying on top of that makes very little difference.
HTML, CSS, and JS minification reduce the size of these files which can result in faster downloading time and faster rendering time for these files, and therefore minification can help improve the website speed.
But what's great about HTML optimization is that you don't have to choose either minification or compression. You can do both! In fact, you should do both. On average, you can expect GZIP compression to shrink an HTML file by 70 to 90 percent.
Verify Your CompressionIn your browser: In Chrome, open the Developer Tools > Network Tab (Firefox/IE will be similar). Refresh your page, and click the network line for the page itself (i.e., www.google.com ). The header “Content-encoding: gzip” means the contents were sent compressed.
I would suggest using compression at the transport layer, and eliminating whitespace from the HTML, but not sacrificing the semantics of your markup in the interest of speed. In fact, the better you "compress" your markup, the less effective the transport layer compression will be. Or, to put it a better way, let the gzip transfer-coding slim your HTML for you, and pour your energy into writing clean markup that renders quickly once it hits the browser.
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