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[SmartCrawl Pro] Please review Flesch-Kincaid readability

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Please check your implementation of the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. The plugin is reporting a score of 8 for my text while other online resources report over 40. The number reported by the plugin doesn’t even match an expected FK grade level.

http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-tests.php

https://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/check.php

I’m hoping that we will be able to set our own acceptable FK minimum. A site I’m working on now, as an example, is a technical site. I fully expect the audience to be over the age of 19. I don’t want my SEO to flag a problem if the site can’t be read by a 12 year old.

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 1:23:17
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Tony G,

    I hope you’re fine and thanks for turning out attention to it!

    i see that you got multiple sites registered with your account and since you didn’t assign any to this post, would you mind sharing an URL to the one in question (or, better yet, to some specific example page/post that you’re referring to in your post)?

    Working with a “real life examples” is always a good thing so that would surely help us (re)evaluate our algorithms here.

    Looking forward to your response,

    Adam

  • Tony G
    • Mr. LetsFixTheWorld

    Um, is SmartCrawl using the FK readability here on WPMU DEV? If so you have hundreds of blog posts to serve as examples. Just compare the FK rating from blog pages/articles here with the provided URLs. (Don’t bother with forum posts.) Or for a test site just copy article text into a new post and check the FK score. That will provide a wide variety of samples from authors with different writing styles – much better than the very limited data set from my brand new sites which are entirely self-authored. I’m citing what I believe is a general issue that I’ve already taken some time to explore. I believe a quick check on your side will confirm some aspect of this. If not, then I’ll have to learn to write differently. :slight_smile:

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Tony G,

    Thanks for your reply!

    I don’t have access to our blog’s back-end to do any kind of comparison so I would really appreciate if you could actually share some example text of yours along with information of the scores that you’re getting in SmartCrawl – so I could compare them.

    So far, I have just used my private site and the scores seem to be a bit different in SmartCrawl than in both testers that you shared. However, my own articles, apart from being reported as readable to the sixth-eight grader, are probably also written on the same 10yrs old little human level, lol. As I tend to use simple language in these posts and, most importantly, not being native English speaker – I don’t have a good “research material” there :slight_smile:

    I will, however, try to do some more tests to see how it goes and let you know here.

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Tony!

    I’ll do what I can to provide examples within the next week or so but as you know from our other exchanges, I’m already spending a ton of time with WPMU DEV and I’d like to cut corners where possible.

    I fully understand that. I’m asking for “real examples” because they would help us investigate it. I’ll keep an eye on those scores on my own sites so please take your time and get back to me whenever it suits you best and I’ll be more than happy to give it some more tests then and discuss that with you developers.

    Kind regards,

    Adam