Could google be penalizing pages made by certain wyswig programs?

[Shiznaught]

I'm familiar with the theory that google takes the quality of the html in a webpage into account for it's it's ranking algorhythm. Given that Google is probably looking for pages that are well designed and put together could it be possible that they are penalizing pages using poor html technique, or for that matter pages made by inferior webdesign programs?

For example, Frontpage comes with every Office installation, and might in fact be the editor of choice for the more amateur web builders. The implication of this is interesting to say the least.

[keeper]

You may want to have a read of this thread where GoogleGuy actually comments on just that theory:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I'd imagine most other search engines are smart enough now to get through HTML errors too.

Of course, if the page is riddled with unclosed tags etc, the content may become unrecognizable from the code.

[Lorel]

I don't know if Google penalizes bad wzywgs, however, about 99.9% of the sites I have redesigned that were on the net for years and getting very little traffic were designed with FrontPage which produces code bloat, deprecated code, etc.

Quite often I will see a page drop in rank for no reason and then find out it had some broken code so I would assume that a clean page would rank higher.

[Shiznaught]

Thanks keeper, and I apologize for posting in the wrong spot.

I just have a question about the thread you posted, what does "validate" mean.

[mrMister]

A site that beats one of mine in the rankings, is a horrendous site produced by saving to HTML from Microsoft Word.

The whole site is in CAPITAL LETTERS, and it's humiliating to be beaten by it :-(

So if MS Word can hit the top of the SERPS, anything can!

[theBear]

Validate means that the page is 100% correct html according to the dtd provided by the page in its header.

The W3C has an online page validator.

Just Google for W3C validator. It should be somewhere in the serps ;).

[incrediBILL]

I'm familiar with the theory that google takes the quality of the html in a webpage into account for it's it's ranking algorhythm

If that was the case I'd be a PR0 with no traffic - no boasting about my HTML, it's garbage that evolved over 7 years and 5 different WYSIWYG tools and I'm always cleaning up messes I find as I convert it to all CSS, yet I dominate keywords all over the place and have for a long time.

I think it's content over HTML.

[mrMister]

I don't think the original poster was necessarily talking about HTML editors that produce invalid code. I think he was talking about HTML editors that produce shoddy code.

I once worked with a designer who insisted on using Dreamweaver. And<font><font><font><font>the code<b></b><i><i>that produces can </font> be pretty attrocious</font></font><b><b></b></b>

However, talking bout validation. I think it would be a bit hypocritical if Google were to start getting fussy about pages that don't validate:
[validator.w3.org...]

[theBear]

Content rules the problem with broken html is that what was content can become ignored invalid html.

Even if your page validates you can have a problem with client side rendering.

Yep a lovely mess the web is.

[theBear]

mrMister do as Google says not as Google does ;).

Just remember the parsers Google uses have to be able to find the content on the pages.

Validation is one way to check.

[mrMister]

I wasn't criticising Google.

My stance on any web sites I'm responsible is that they must be viewable on all major web clients.

It's nice if they do validate and that's what I aim for, but the odd descrepancy doesn't bother me.

[theBear]

I just wanted to make sure that the party asking knew why Google mentions it at all.

I am not one to heap roses on Google.

Heaven only knows how much grief a minor algo change can cause me. The problem always shows up after the damage is done.

So when broken html causes the most important part of the page to go bye bye, do you blame G or the fact that the html is busted?