Affiliate code breaking HTML standards..

how to deal with it?

[FourDegreez]

It is hypothesized that search engines look more kindly upon pages with valid HTML. However when I validate my pages, it seems that affiliate code is always causing it to fail. Things like ALT tags for images I can usually add manually. What's bugging me in particular is that validation chokes on ampersands in URLs. So two questions, 1) do you guys go for valid HTML, and 2) what to do about those darned ampersands? For instance, I get a ton of errors like:

reference to entity "search" for which no system identifier could be generated

when there is a &search= in a URL.

[moishe]

I used to let this bother me, I even went so far as to run AFF URL's through an email encoder to convert them to giant ASCII strings to make them validate.

At some point I realized that pages I had that were mostly valid but not 100% ranked just as well as pages that were 100% valid and stopped fretting about it.