From an SEO perspective, would it be better to just upload an image of an equation rather than using mathjax to display that equation. The reason I ask is because I rendered an equation on my site using mathjax, and found that a huge amount of code with a lot of inline css is produced to represent that equation:
<p style="text-align:center;"><span class="MathJax_Preview"></span><div class="MathJax_Display" role="textbox" aria-readonly="true" style="text-align: center;"><span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-1-Frame" style=""><nobr><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1"><span style="display: inline-block; position: relative; width: 95px; height: 0px; font-size: 116%;"><span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(19.7px 20880px 68.8px -7.9px); top: -51px; left: 0px;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-2"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-3" style="font-family: MathJax_Math; font-style: italic;">V<span style="display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; height: 1px; width: 3.9px;"></span></span><span class="mo" id="MathJax-Span-4" style="font-family: MathJax_Main; padding-left: 5.8px;">=</span><span class="mfrac" id="MathJax-Span-5" style="padding-left: 8.3px; padding-right: 2.5px;"><span style="display: inline-block; position: relative; width: 13.5px; height: 0px;"><span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(33.9px 20880px 54px -8.4px); top: -65.1px; left: 50%; margin-left: -5.5px;"><span class="mn" id="MathJax-Span-6" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">4</span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 51px;"></span></span><span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(34.1px 20880px 54.5px -8.1px); top: -36.7px; left: 50%; margin-left: -5.5px;"><span class="mn" id="MathJax-Span-7" style="font-family: MathJax_Main;">3</span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 51px;"></span></span><span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(17.7px 20880px 25px -9px); top: -26.6px; left: 0px;"><span style="border-left-width: 13.5px; border-left-style: solid; display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; width: 0px; height: 1.3px; vertical-align: 0px;"></span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 22px;"></span></span></span></span><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-8" style="font-family: MathJax_Math; font-style: italic; padding-left: 3.5px;">π<span style="display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; height: 1px; width: 0.1px;"></span></span><span class="msubsup" id="MathJax-Span-9"><span style="display: inline-block; position: relative; width: 18.6px; height: 0px;"><span style="position: absolute; clip: rect(38.8px 20880px 54.2px -8.6px); top: -51px; left: 0px;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-10" style="font-family: MathJax_Math; font-style: italic;">r</span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 51px;"></span></span><span style="position: absolute; top: -59.6px; left: 9px;"><span class="texatom" id="MathJax-Span-11"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-12"><span class="mn" id="MathJax-Span-13" style="font-size: 70.7%; font-family: MathJax_Main;">3</span></span></span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 51px;"></span></span></span></span></span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; height: 51px;"></span></span></span><span style="border-left-width: 0px; border-left-style: solid; display: inline-block; overflow: hidden; width: 0px; height: 45px; vertical-align: -15.8px;"></span></span></nobr></span></div><script type="math/tex; mode=display" id="MathJax-Element-1">V = \frac{4}{3}\pi r^{3}</script></p>
Here is an image of the amount of code that is (it’s basically one page on a word file with font calibri size 11):
I think the above is bad seo, and that I’m better off just including an image of the equation, but I couldn’t find too many sources on the matter (just one: http://www.frihost.com/forums/vt-127057.html) and am wondering what you guys think.
Personally I do not believe you should worry that much about your maths code impacting SEO.
First off all if the code is generated by JavaScript library, Googlebot probably will not execute it. Google says (Matt Cutts) that they can execute some JavaScript but not all.
Regarding “huge amount of code“, Google search result list includes pages on which the searched keywords were located not further than 520 KB from the start of the page (link). The code you provided is around 3.2 KB. So even if Google were indexing dynamically generated content (which I doubt they are, explanation above) you would still have lots of “space”.
I hope that will help.