HTML Compression and SEO

Question

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?

Answer 1

in the transport layer use compression and remove/eliminate the white spaces in html the compression in the transport layer depends on the compression of the markup

Compressing pages with an GZIP compression in the webserver

Reducing size of images, CSS, javascript etc

Considering how the browser's layout engine loads your pages.

try out these methods too if you want to take more advantage