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Slow down!
There is something unclear: what is W3C valid?
There is .css markup validation, there are 5 to 7 different types of (XHTML - HTML) markup options and then things that are not checked as they are either in server side or simply not checked.
Further validation might include various levels of user access.
The fact that one can NOT name 2 times an ALT text with the same keywords or that one should NOT place the word "image" in an image alt text --- all these W3C validation checks do count highly on google!
[edited by: tedster at 11:37 pm (utc) on Oct. 30, 2006]
The turn towards a "partnership" of use between those in SEO and the W3C is achieved when we are able to see how H1 to H6 content is actually part of the check that the validator offers --- that the idea of a page being 99% valid with no major tag errors is certainly a sure way to assure one that the cross browser reading of the page will work IN THE FUTURE when (in 50 or 150 years from now) markup will change and what was not done right will be lost.
You may say "what do I care for my keyword placement when I am dead?" The answer is that if your product, your firm, your essay, your photography, or what ever it is that you have made and placed in ranking is SAVED over time it will be saved owing to its markup.
Value for long long term placement comes by pure logic from the w3c.
Its about what happens, now.
Now, the use of proper (www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/) - accessibility guidelines define a huge number of factors that we debate.
I'm not saying that you "shouldn't" produce valid code, but rather that Google does not care right now, as long as the errors do not make the mark-up unspiderable. And googlebot does have some decent error-recovery routines. It has to!
This kind of discussion is one of the reasons I started the thread -- to help us sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Is W3C validation a Best Practice for web development? Absolutely. Is validation an important element for Google rankings today? Not one bit.
The turn towards a "partnership" of use between those in SEO and the W3C is achieved when we are able to see how H1 to H6 content is actually part of the check that the validator offers --- that the idea of a page being 99% valid with no major tag errors is certainly a sure way to assure one that the cross browser reading of the page will work IN THE FUTURE when (in 50 or 150 years from now) markup will change and what was not done right will be lost.You may say "what do I care for my keyword placement when I am dead?" The answer is that if your product, your firm, your essay, your photography, or what ever it is that you have made and placed in ranking is SAVED over time it will be saved owing to its markup.
Value for long long term placement comes by pure logic from the w3c.
What you're asserting does not affect rankings, and it's incumbent on you to state whether your assertions are
-True
-Probable
-Opinion
-Myth
with regard to Google rankings. So which is it to be?
true - w3c advanced markup (as mentioned) DOES play a role. As it is ONE AND THE SAME thing. (Valid markup for accessibility guidelines is valid also for SEO!).
[edited by: alfawolf7 at 2:32 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2006]
alfawolf7, in the spirit of this thread, how have you tested that assertion?
Question: Does anyone think that there are certain concepts or words that if used in your title and description will be "liked" by google. Crazy?
Side point to charge past I suppose, but Google does definitely penalize some non valid code, for instance malformed title or description tags.I've seen instances of malformed head section code (no ending tags) and what happened is that the snippets got messed up - no penalty though. In some cases it may make it impossible to properly parse the page, which isn't the same thing as affecting scoring.
I came to this by chance as I run several sites for senior citizens - and made the markup for them - and the keyword ranking for these pages tops all my others.
Sequence is *not* not an indication of consequence, it's most often a coincidence. It's faulty logic like that which gives birth to unfounded myths.
Incidentally, Matt Cutts clearly stated in one of his videos that Google has no signal for validated code.
Pages without descriptions (that can be read) get deindexed and/or dumped into click for omitted results hell. A penalty is having a handicap or disadvantage imposed like this. It doesn't have to be a death sentence.
google penalise for malormed tags, that is, if you stuff the page up it can not make sense of it, or thinks your are trying to scam it.
Yes, it is a breach of standards to leave out your alt tags, and i think google is not keen on this, simply because its bad practice, not describing what the images are.
But no, my testing shows no penalising for not w3c compliant, the top site in my main area of compeition is nothing like compliant, page rank 7.
plenty of compliant competition, no way they could be no1 if compliancy was an issue, 172 fails on their home page alone, and they just aren't that much better than the other sites that they could survice a penalty for this.
However.....
- That's not to say they wont in the future.
- Complying to XHTML standards may have it's benefits - eg: alt attributes in img tags.
- In regard to the whole XHTML + CSS - if you do a site redesign, it should only require a CSS update, meaning your users see a shiny new site but Google sees no change.
If someone simply launched a dozen pages with various degrees of html-erros at the same time and on the same backlink-graph- and folder- level of a website, we might see after a few days or weeks which one of these pages has been indexed. All you need is some absolutely zero-competitive keywords in each of the pages. However, this would not tell us anything about the impact of html-conformity on ranking. But it would indeed be quite interesting to explore the limits of googlebot's error-tolerance.
The problem is, that the universe of all possible html-errors is actually quite large. Any ideas on how to narrow down this issue?
Although I agree W3C code does not directly outweigh other ranking signals today I agree with Tedster W3C it certainly is good web design practice and there's no evidence IT HURTS.
[validator.w3.org...]
And googlebot does have some decent error-recovery routines. It has to!
From a programmer's perspective, there is a much better solution than recovering from bad markup - simply ignore most markup by throwing out every tag that they don't care about.
When they only look at the tags they care about, those tags can have an impact. They just need to be formed well enough for Google to understand them. It isn't a validation issue, it is an issue about being able to recognize what that specific tag means.
<title>super green widgets</title>
is recognizable even if it doesn't validate. Put it in the body instead of the head. Put <center> tags around it. Add some unknown attribute that doesn't validate. That is how you test this claim, does an invalid version of a well formed title tag still have the desired effect.
The same goes for alt attributes. Yes they help, but can you come up with an invalid one that has the same effect? I bet you can.
There is no need to recover for invalid markup that you are ignoring.
Could someone please show me a page that validates correctly? I have yet to see it...
I have several pages that validates HTML 4.01 Strict correctly (my whole website are build on valid HTML).
But it's only a couple of months old and have been valid even before I published it. So I haven't been able to measure or test if valid MarkUp helps a website in the SERPs.
If Matt Cutts has said in a very recent video that Google does not recognize validity, then can someone explain how it's used toward ranking? Or is Matt mistaken? Who wants to say that they are right and Matt Cutts is wrong?
Too many times do I see sites with unclosed title tags something a validator would catch. How do you think google penalizes these sites? Would you like to gamble your serps?
Understand how html works and concentrate on proper title tags, description, meta and most important href tags and your content.
If your flash is not validate, that really does not matter since google struggles to index that....
A true statement Marcia.
However many (as in most, but not all) such errors are caught by a validation system such as W3C makes availible.
Validating forces you to learn the academic roots of html -- and that helps because Google and other search engines by their very nature MUST come at their job from a strict academic and theorectical angle. So, as I see it, the more you understand about HTML the more you will know about how to send the clearest possible signal to the search engines.
So it's a spill-over effect that improves your rankings, and not a direct algo component. That same kind of spill-over happens when you take on accessibility disciplines as well.
The error in thinking that needs to be undone is considering html as a kind of layout language. It isn't that at all, it's a "mark-up" language that assumes a starting document and then adds "mark-up" to clarify the various portions of the document in a semantic sense.
The rendering of a document, whether visual, aural or whatever, is not involved in the core discipline of html. And search engines are looking for those semantically clear signals for the relevance of your document.
100% agree.
In the course of the past two years, I am sure I have looked at the source code of over 1000 web sites mostly in top ten rankins. It's amaing how many would not validate. It's amazing how many break in mozilla and safari, yet are in top ten and some are #1. It's incredible how many don't even have a doctype. The navigation on many is appalling. If it wasn't for the back button....well you understand what I am saying.
No- google could care less if it validates. Sometimes I wonder if it doesn't help. Another facet of the dumbing down?
The original question was if "non W3C compliant code will harm the site's ranking" - I've said it was a myth.
On the other side: of course, having a comliant code will only help.
alfawolf7, the W3C validation that I meant is the one they have on this page [validator.w3.org...]
(Having outbound related links helps - True ;c)
Another point, as Marcia pointed, was validation vs HTML errors. In the original post I've assumed we're dicussing the differences between old HTML and new HTML - and not the HTML errors (validator catches those too) - so:
HTML errors will hurt site's ranking - True
Exmple: one webmaster opens the <a href> and never closes it - how does the spyder know there to close it?
So I say the Validation helping SEO is a myth. Personally I find good old fashioned HTML 4.0 to rank better than any XHTML site I ever did with the same techniques.
I believe table based HTML can rank better than DIV based code or at least the way I write it makes a difference.
I think its now a preference on whether or not you want your code to validate. Old Javascipts also have a tendency to not validate.
