Forum Moderators: open
I have just picked up a client whose site ranks No 1 for 5 types of "coloured widgets location" but extremely badly for each "coloured widget".
The phrase without the locater is obviously more competitive but even so (IMO) the SERPS on those terms should be top 20 or top 50 worst case. They are however in the deepest depths along with totaly irrelevent pages.
I noticed that most pages were lacking a "Doctype" definition.
I wondered if the absence of "Doctype" was scoring negatives but because the serch term with locator was easy pickings that it still came out on top.
Any thoughts or firm knowledge regarding Google and Doctype?
It might be a negative, but it's likely to be a very small one. For instance, I'm #1 out of 512,000 and #2 out ot 2,398,000 with no doctype.
That was the type of feedback I was hoping for.
Numbers I can handle numbers.
In section 4.4 of The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www7.scu.edu.au] Brin and Page write:
Any parser which is designed to run on the entire Web must handle a huge array of possible errors. These range from typos in HTML tags to kilobytes of zeros in the middle of a tag, non-ASCII characters, HTML tags nested hundreds deep, and a great variety of other errors that challenge anyone's imagination to come up with equally creative ones.
Google's job is to extract as much information as possible from imperfect web pages. Yes, correct HTML would make life much easier for Googlebot. BUT she is paid to get the content that's in them thar pages, not to complain about HTML errors.
