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Avatar Went Hot: March 11, 2008 - 7:32 am
Posted By: Glendz 266 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.seocontest2008.com)
Category: SEO
I am not sure if I'd agree to this but what the site is saying seems valid. But I just grew up knowing that valid W3C code is required to rank high. Is it really needed?
11 Comments     

Comments

from JohnWeb 265 days ago #
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A claim backed up by Googles own documentation:

Does validating my site (with a tool such as the W3C validator) help my site's ranking in Google's search results pages?

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/web/faqs-for-crawling-indexing-and-ranking-2#valid-code

  • No, at least not directly.  However, to the extent that cleaning up your HTML makes your site more accessible to people with disabilities or folks accessing your pages on portable or other devices, it can improve the popularity of your site... increasing natural links to your site (which can help with your Google ranking), traffic, and so on.
 

from Glendz 265 days ago #
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Thanks John, I wonder if the indirect benefit is worth doing for most of my clients who have sites that really don't validate. If it is worth spending the time?

from mpilatow 265 days ago #
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Glendz, that would depend. If there are other more important factors that can be fixed those should be done first. Also, if there are egregious errors that break the crawler you should clean those up. After the important stuff is done you can go back and clean up the code. It won't hurt and may make things easier for the crawlers but there are many more important things to work on before you start worrying about validation.

from MattWa 265 days ago #
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Look at the cached version of your page on Google. If it looks OK, validation is nice but not necessary. If you only see part of the page, you have a problem and the validation process will probably fix it - if the page looks ok in IE and FF, it's probably invalid code that is making the spider break.

from BenjArriola 265 days ago #
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I still make sure my site validates well, but it is more of a superstitious belief that it will help ranking *LOL* But I like MattWa's test. If cached version does not show a complete page, then it can be a broken tag somewhere. Something open and not properly closed. I think web designers and web developer with good XHTML habits would rarely encounter this problem. I think validation is a good QA step in general for any web company before making their site go live. Whether or not there is an SEO benefit.

from sydelct 265 days ago # - show/hide this comment
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i think site validation is more for the browsers than for the search engines.  however, if they do check for it and helps ranking then might as well keep your sites validated.  after all, validated sites are good sites anyway.  

from DarkMatter 265 days ago #
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I try to validate everything, as long as I can do it quickly. If I have a problem getting a page to validate, I usually don't bother. I have some sites that are completely validated, some that are a mess, and there is no apparent pattern to their rankings. So for me, validation is gravy: great to have but nonessential.

from g1smd 264 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
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Bad code can stop parts of a page being indexed, or prevent certain links from being followed.

Really bad code can cause wierd rendering problems in certain browsers. In some cases it can even crash the browser.


Why even bother to add a DOCTYPE declaration to the page if you don't validate the code to that standard?

from DanFrost 264 days ago #
Votes: 2 | Vote:
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g1smd is right, partially at least.

Really bad code can mean that a crawler can't make sense of the page to read content or links.

However, there's absolutely no need to satisfy all the requirements of these high and mighty standards. As long as the main tabs such as tags, etc are there (and closed) then a crawler should have no problem finding that it needs.

http://www.crawlscore.com/blog/make_your_website_easier_to_crawl
  • 1. Well structured HTML

      This doesn't mean that your site has to adhere to W3C standards but at the very least, one set of tags will help and generally ensuring your HTML tags are closed.

 

 

from kevgibbo 264 days ago #
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I think it's always worth making sure the site validates just to make sure you haven't made any big cock-ups which might be visible to search engines but not users.

from letusee 258 days ago #
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We better make site validation an important step in web publication


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