Is W3C compliance taken into account?

[CaptainSalad2]

If not why not? Wouldn’t that cut down on a lot of spam sites that are cheaply done, surely creating a W3C compliant site is a signal that the owner took the time to craft a properly coded site that renders well across all browsers?

My understanding is that if a site isn’t W3C compliant the browser falls back to run the site in quirks mode (good enough) surely this should be taken into consideration on some level by google?

Don’t want to offend any non W3C developers here but it was DRUMMED into us back in uni years back so should count for something?

Currently the sites I see ranking against all my clients follow the same pattern

1)NON HTML/CSS compliant
2)Badly fail googles own PageSpeed Insights test BADLY compared to page 2 results
3)THIN content, under 100 words per page
4)No (or very few links 20 ish at most)
5) Keyword clouds keyword ~ keyword ~ keyword

This all makes me think Penguin 2.0 has destroyed every site but the badly done sites that probably sat on page 20 up till the last few weeks/months. These business owners MUST be wondering why the hell their phones are ringing all of a sudden.

[seoskunk]

It's not taken into account as a ranking factor. I think "there are too many good sites out there that don't comply" was Google's answer when asked this.

[Sand]

No. But if you want to ensure that your pages are parsed correctly, W3C compliance is the way to go.

[CaptainSalad2]

Thanks for the reply(S)! I put the W3C icon on all my clients sites but I’m now wondering if I should nofollow? What would my clients benefit more from?

On the one hand im giving away juice correct? But there was a time you received a benefit from linking to good sites? But then also it might look spam like linking to other sites in the footer? Google have really confused everything when it comes to linking....

[seoskunk]

LOL nofollow the W3c........ like they can't be trusted.........

Yeah do it! Just to show how absurd this whole "nofollow" is.

Ages ago I used to ping the "Your page is valid" to get a link out of the w3c then they disallowed those pages in robots.txt :(

[Robert Charlton]

On the one hand im giving away juice correct?

Nofollowing a link going off-site does not conserve link juice. The nofollowed link is still counted in the denominator as far as the PageRank formula is concerned... but instead of going to elsewhere on the web, the link juice on an off-site nofollowed link simply flows into a kind of black hole and disappears.

If you're worried about the link juice flowing from one W3C icon, then you're in a hording mentality and should adjust. The icon itself, btw, doesn't gain you any points because of compliance. It might demonstrate to someone who knows what W3C is that you care about your site.

[turbocharged]

W3C compliant site is a signal that the owner took the time to craft a properly coded site that renders well across all browsers?

Google's homepage fails validation with 23 errors and 4 warnings. Draw your own conclusions on this one.

[CaptainSalad2]

Thanks for the response guys, ill just leave them as they are and not add a nofollow like I have been doing for years.

In YOUR opinions though, should google give a LITTLE weight to W3C compliant in terms of trying to improve the quality of the web?

I was just clutching at straws really while trying to work out why carefully crafted custom sites with unique textual content are suddenly being outranked by sites built in FrontPage with thin content and a general shabby feel that I haven’t seen since the 98!

Linking out to other sites (site wide) was one of the things I can now cross off my list as to why they are better sites than my clients.

P.S if googles response to not giving a W3C perk was "there are too many good sites out there that don't comply", its a shame they didn't have the same reasoning when it came to something out of the website owners control, penguin.