Google rankings and wysiwyg editors

Can they hurt rankings

[Buckley]

Hi,

I used a wysiwyg editor to build my website as i didn't know enough html and i wanted to concentrate my learning curve on SEO. Is it possible that using these editors could hurt my rankings on Google?

I have asked this question on the forums of the company who make the editor and some of the users of this product say no it want hurt but they are very pro the product.

Any thoughts?

Thnaks.

[korkus2000]

Code bloat can hurt, but normally the mainstream WYSIWYG programs don't really hurt. There are plenty of people using Dreamweaver and frontpage and getting excellent rankings.

[martinibuster]

GoogleGuy is on record as saying that non-validating code isn't an impediment to their spidering.

That said, it DOES make sense to go easy on the JavaScript because it gets in the way of the MEAT that the spiders are trying to get to, which is your content.

If you use your wysiwyg editor wisely, you can create pretty lean pages.
Donts
Don't use "layers" to create your page and then use the "convert layers to table" feature. What happens is that you get a highly complicated table structure full of dozens of emptey TD's. YUCK! I have some of my earlier stuff hanging out on the web like that.

I had a mentor force me to get back to my roots and handcode my work, and though it took more time, the code downloaded faster and was SE friendlier.

Donts
Stay away from fancy JS.

Minimize your JS as much as possible. When there is an alternative to JS, work it in. Otherwise link it externally.

Do's
Do learn HTML coding.

Do's
Do visit the W3C Validation Page [validator.w3.org] and validate your work. If it validates, it should work regardless of platform and browser.

Do's
Do visit alistapart [alistapart.org] and
read up on webmastering, ecommerce, css, ets. DO notice how Freaking fast the page loads. It's a beautiful web site.

Anybody else have other things to add?

[born2drv]

I use Dreamweaver exclusively when making my sites and I have top rankings :)

The key is to be able to develop an understanding of what the html codes mean and be able to go in and edit them manually to remove excess code.

If you use the new version of dreamweaver it's even CSS friendly so you can get rid of all those font tags and externally load a style sheet and use pull down menu's to select the font you want from your CSS file.

[sandor]

i used to do all my html coding by hand ... til i discovered dreamweaver way back in 98/99 ... haven't looked back since. dreamweaver rocks ... if you know how to use it, it'll kick out good clean code.

[martinibuster]

if you know how to use it, it'll kick out good clean code.

I think your input would be more helpful if you share HOW to use it. To state "if you know how to use it" doesn't help anybody.

What WOULD help is if you shared some of your insights.

[theposter]

there is something to be said here about the fact that the version of your wysiwyg editor could determne which google domain you rank well on. My sites seem to do very very well on the european index...inspite of the fact I did nothing to exclusively promote them on those domains....e.g google.de and google.fr!

[heini]

theposter, how could that be? Ranking on local Google's is no different than on general google, assuming the searches are not filtered (and with some noticeable exceptions). If they are filtered for language or locality (pages from a country) then the filters are just that, language and IP, nothing else.

[martinibuster]

theposter
I have to agree with Heini about your observation.

There is no way that your version of editor could influence google.de and google.fr. How? The code? Voodoo?

As I mentioned earlier, google guy is on record as stating that google is forgiving of coding errors, i.e. coding errors don't make a difference.

[kovacs]

I work in Dreamweaver for setting up templates and complicated layouts, but you always have to go back through and clean up the code to make it efficient. I do stuff like:

* replace <p>&nbsp</p> with <br> for line breaks;
* remove extraneous font and div tags (you should use CSS anyway);
* messy table structures;
* extraneous head content - I take out everything except <title> and meta keywords and description, plus external css and js calls.

Dreamweaver also has quite a cool source formatting command. :)

I don't think using an editor could have any effect on your rankings per se (Google rewards you for good content, not for being the world's greatest html coder), but by stripping out all the chaff you improve the ratio of text content to html markup and make it easier for the spider to get a clear view of what your page is about.

[Powdork]

I use dreamweaver exclusively but have learned a LOT of other stuff from how buggy it is. I use a liquid layout which means tables must be constantly edited by hand when content is added in wysiwig mode. I'm able to write html as a result of editing DW code. I can get and manipulate js (never tried it with DW just online and through here). It seems to be good for working with basic forms although I'm not. The good thing about seo and dw is that you can drag and drop layers anywhere on the page and then drag and drop the tag for the layer anywhere in the code. That way your navbar, which may be top left, can have a tag at the bottom of your code. There are other simple examples of this. I know this is really just basic css, but Dreamweaver makes it simple. I should say I do like DW alot and that I'm only using 3.0. I certainly don't think for a second it could hurt your rankings in any way.

Unless you used FrontPage ;)

[ericjunior]

Dreamweaver is an excellent starting place - but use it so you can view the code it creates at the same time. You will soon find yourself editing the source and hardcoding yourself.

When i started and was using dreamweaver exclusively to create sites & i had no problem with google and my sites rankings were very good - so i see no problem.

[Buckley]

Thanks for all the responses.

So the wash up seems to be that the code wysiwyg editors spits out won't effect my rankings in Google. That's good news.

The other thing i would like to note is it seems a lot of people who responded know html but use wysiwyg editors to make life easier when building sites. Then they go in and clean up the code.

I don't know much at all about html...I buit my site with the wysiwyg editor out of necessity because of my lack of html knowledge....so cleaning up the code and changing this and that is not an option for me at this stage.

But thats ok if it's not effecting rankings :)

Thanks again everyone....and feel free to add anything.

[Powdork]

I don't know much at all about html...I buit my site with the wysiwyg editor out of necessity because of my lack of html knowledge....so cleaning up the code and changing this and that is not an option for me at this stage.

Yes but thats how you learn it. if nothing else work in split screen mode so you can watch how your changes in wysiwig affect the code.
I generally find that DW will spit out some decent code if you do everything right the first time. Its just when you decide to move things around or delete things that it will leave artifacts behind.

[martinibuster]

I don't know much at all about html...

That's ok. That's why I said, in post#3, that you should go to the w3c validation service and validate your code. They will tell you what is deficient, giving you the opportunity to learn about the code, and to correct it.

This is one of the things that make the difference between being a professional and being a hack. Good luck!

:) Y

[Buckley]

martinibuster,

Went to that site and put in my url. I got this message

[I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:

The HTTP Content-Type field.
The XML Declaration.
The HTML "META" element.
And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.

Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use. ]

Could you please explain what this means exactly and what i've done wrong....or is there a serious problem with my site.

Thanks

[Powdork]

I think it is referring to what type of document type it is. For instance http 1.0 or http 4.0. This would represent the level of standards for which you are having it validated.
As an aside. Whenever I validate it tells me about all my spacer.gifs that don't have alt text and that i am such a bad guy for it. I personally find it to be a waste of time but thats just me and my needs.

[SEO_Apostle]

Buckley,

To work properly the W3C validator requires a doc type declaration before the <html> tag (such as <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

For character encoding you'll need something like <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> which tells W3C's validator that your document (in this case) is set Western European encoding.

The above is an example for XHTML documents. For ordinary HTML (validating as HTML 4.01 transitional) you'll need to add <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> before the <html> tag, along with a charset definition such as <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> in the <HEAD> of your document.

Of course, you can validate files locally (i.e. from your C: drive) or by entering the URL for the relevant page.

Hope this helps

Apostle

[europeforvisitors]

If you're using a WYSIWYG program, remember to include a descriptive title between the <title> and </title> tags--either in HTML view or via the program's dialogue box that lets you enter page properties. Meta description and keyword tags are a good idea, too (not for Google, but for search engines that crawl them).

I've noticed that quite a few WYSIWYG- and database-generated pages lack page titles, which puts them at a disadvantage in Google. (This isn't the fault of the programs, but of people who use the programs incorrectly.)

[Powdork]

Good point europeforvisitors. The page properties box (DW) works best for me because its size is set at about 58 characters which keeps me comfortably under the 64 character limit as long as I don't go past.

[brotherhood of LAN]

hopefully this template is handy for barebones validation, google or otherwise.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html lang="en"><head>
<title></title>
<meta name="description" content="" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/x.css" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/css; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
</head><body>

</body></html>

1. the DTD stating that it's XHTML to be used in this doc
2. the doc is english
3. the head of the doc, including your title, and meta description. I reckon this is what most people will go for as barebones in a standard page.
4. a link to a style sheet (external of course!)
5. meta tag stating which character set is used here.
6. your meaty doc.

im on notetab, which is cool for storing these sort of things. I guess that's one of my preferences for using it over FP.

^{You may want to use H1 tags too ;)}

[GamblinTraveler]

I find that the further down the page a specific keyword lives, the less value G gives it. Most WYSIWYG editors add lots of stuff that isn't necessary so it's always important to go in and edit the HTML code by hand. That's not to say you shouldn't use a WYSIWYG to start with.

Along this same line, I suspect that CSS helps pages rank better because "further down the page" isn't quite as far down if you move lots of the editing HTML out of the page and into the CSS file.

Has anyone validated this suspicion?

Does anyone know how many (what percent) of your visitors you leave in the dark by requiring CSS?

-GT

[dwilson]

Is it safe to say that using MS Word/Excel's Save as HTML routine is a bad idea? That's the worst example of bloat I have ever seen. It's what's kept sending me back to Notepad or PFE.

[europeforvisitors]

Most WYSIWYG editors add lots of stuff that isn't necessary so it's always important to go in and edit the HTML code by hand. That's not to say you shouldn't use a WYSIWYG to start with.

I use FrontPage 2002, and I can't think of anything "unnecessary" that it adds except for redundant font tags in tables. I suppose one might be able to save a few hundred bytes by careful hand-editing of pages with extensive tables, but that wouldn't be enough to have much (if any) effect on Google placement.

Is it safe to say that using MS Word/Excel's Save as HTML routine is a bad idea? That's the worst example of bloat I have ever seen. It's what's kept sending me back to Notepad or PFE.

There's a good reason behind the apparent madness. When you save a Word or Excel file as an HTML document, you're also saving the information that's needed to open and edit that document in Word or Excel. This can be a great advantage if you're publishing documents on an intranet (or even on the public internet, if you want those documents to be editable in their original applications). However, it also means that only someone very clueless would use Word or Excel as a primary authoring tool for general Web publishing.

[bcolflesh]

You can remove most (but not all) of the screwed-up code FP produces by running the pages through the MS Office HTML Filter 2.0, found on the MS Office download site.

Regards,
Brent