Thread

I used the old, look at your website, it’s not valid in W3C and this will cause issues with search engines blah blah, the client then proceeded to type in Amazon.co.uk and Google.co.uk, and the results are shocking, neither valid with hundreds of errors…

Just shows that maybe spending hours making sure a site is valid in W3C isn’t that important afterall…

The only reason why amazon and google don’t validate and still have high seo rankings is because they are already established sites.

Standards compliance is a very usefuly habit to get into

The goal of W3C compliance as it relates to SEO is that it makes sure your site’s content isn’t being obscured by lousy markup. 100% compliance is often not realistic or cost effective for the time invested, but getting close to the mark makes your site that much easier to parse for search engine spiders.

I thought the same thing years ago, but you have to compare apples with apples and not apples with oranges.  Google does not need SEO… 😊 and Amazon and other huge sites will get indexed as you have seen but still might not get the best search results.

Um, if you take two smaller, newer sites, with pretty much the same content and meta rich keywords, the valid site will most likely get better indexing in search results.

There is an article from google folks (that I should search for) that sort of says that sites with valid markup will be taken more seriously then sites with hack markup..etc.

Anywho…long story short…don’t bog down it perfect validation but try to do all you can…it’s worked for myself and many others…this really is a old debate that’s been around for a while…

but I like you was upset one day when I saw my hero “Google” hehe…with the worst markup and hack bastardized inline css…js…etc…lol.

 
 
As a sort of a side note, has anyone managed to display Google Adsense without umpteen HTML errors?
 
 
 

I agree with @Jamie thats its a good habit to get into designing for standard compliant websites. Forming the right habits always pay off in the long run.

Also it helps to keep all that javascript and CSS you might have in your files, and move it to external javascripts and css files; as they’re not doing your SEO any good.

What this does is make sure your users can cache those files on first load + search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

Theoretically, javascript and CSS should be ignored by web spiders. It’s easy to pick out (just look for the script and style tags) and doesn’t represent the content of the site, only the way in which that content is presented.

Two good reads related to:

Valid (X)HTML - Is it important?
http://www.leemunroe.com/how-important-is-valid-html-web-standards/

Google SEO Test - Google Prefers Valid HTML & CSS
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/

Add as far as including your Javascript and CSS in external files…tis a must for code to content ratio.
Try this tool or many like it on the web to check you site.
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/tools/ContentToTextRatio.php

I would recommend Reading the original PageRank paper it can still be found at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (think this is the right URL currently typing from iPod touch no copy/paste facilities) it will show you one of the 200+ factors the effects your sites ranking within google SERPs.

This one might stir up some emotions but I would argue that google and yahoo web pages might not validate but do something even better than that…they display nicely on a huge variety of browsers and platforms.

I disagree that cross-browser compliance and adherence to standards are mutually exclusive. I don’t even think that adhering to standards incurs a significant cost over not doing so.