Bad coding / poor rankings?

[lee_sufc]

I have a site which has been online for a few years now. Over this time it has grown gradually and we've been happy with the rankings (albeit for a few slides now and again but this happens).

I have someone working on my site at present who said lots of the coding there at present isn't needed and needs tidying up - quoting me with a price to do this work for me.

What I was wondering is, does the coding serisouly affect ranking? The site loads very fast and I've never experienced any problems in the past?!?

[duncan biscuits]

There are probably quite a few highly ranked sites that have poor coding (nested table layouts, ultra-thick tag soup etc) so bad coding does not necessarily mean automatic poor rankings.

One thing about search engine bots is that apparently they can't read JavaScript. So people who use JS menus are not giving the bots anything to read. Also bots can't 'read' images, so if your site is mainly images you should make sure you use proper descriptive 'alt' attributes in your pics.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I suggest you keep your cash in your pocket for now and get a few more opinions on your coding before spending good money on what might not even be a problem.

[Jim Catanich]

Having told my customers this many time, I usually give them the following reasons.

Bad code is defined as code that doesn't work.
Bad code is code that if removed doesn't change anything.
etc.

But the real reason is to remove as much code as possible to increase the "density" of the code to keyword ratio. This is what improves ranking.

May I suggest runing your code thru a "spider simulator". It will give you some very interesting information. And run the code thru a HTML Validation Checker that will highlight the coding errors.

Jim Catanich