News Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Published: Jan 31, 2009 - 07:09 am
Story Found By: UtahSEOpro 1210 Days ago
Category: SEO
W3C refers to the World Wide Web Consortium working to develop open standards for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3) so that Web documents can be consistently displayed across all platforms.
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Will non-standard code affect search engine optimization? Probably not.There was a time a few years ago when many coded for "correct" display in Internet Explorer <b>only</b> on the concept that "IE is the most widely used browser". I always wondered what they said to their clients because it’s not an either/or thing, and stating that IE is the most widely used browser and so must be supported (which, of course, any client would agree with) leaves out the explanation that *all* browsers could easily be coded for. My best guess is that some coders, not realizing that IE had specific display bugs, would code for IE and then encounter problems with display in other modern browsers, and just couldn’t figure it out.But this is rather old news (except for some websites, which still pretty much work only in IE). Web Standards (with capitals) are about how pages display in browsers, and the Web Standards Project has been fighting since 1998 for browser makers to implement standards, so now we have major modern browsers *more or less* displaying things the same way, which is a relief for coders. (Would that browser makers would completely implement what was agreed upon with the W3C, though.)For us out here, I think the issue is in coding websites correctly so that, as browsers evolve, you’re not having to recode old errors. (Believe it or not, this is a pretty heated issue in some forums.) At any rate, the W3.org validators are excellent tools for validating code — however, they could be updated: throw one dynamic URL onto a page and you’ll get a long string of "errors" that aren’t really errors. But note Molly Holzschlag’s December 2008 post, W3C Validators in Jeopardy. Without the W3C validators, many of us would find our jobs more difficult.That said, I don’t see that using invalid code would completely mess up rankings unless you *really* messed it up and search engines couldn’t figure it out.I also don’t see that adhering to coding standards stifles one’s creativity. But I can see that being made to think "inside the box" (conform to the box) might — rather similar to designing along the lines of what you know will be easy to code. And I know that there are a number of CSS improvements that I could wish for.But, it’s your site. Go for it.
One value is that you can submit too w3csites.com and get a link back :-) otherwise I guess it shows that you care; but (and I know this from experience) just becasuse a site validates doesn’t make it perfectly coded.
W3C errors are quite relevant to SEO as they affect spiders’ readability of the website.
As long as there are no giant errors that could throw off a parsor, no. I’ve had several clients lately though with XML declarations on html files, missing html tags altogether, etc. That’s when asking the client to validate the site with the W3C Validator is helpful.
Yes. Note that, without a doctype, a page cannot be validated. Of course, you could validate your code by eye, but doing that with each page is sure to be time-consuming.