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Anybody have any comments or thoughts to share?
Good clean code is always better to have. If your code is broken, then you can't expect it to be indexed fully.
I think everyone should valdiate and clean up as much as possible, but I don't believe that 100% valdiation is all that much better than 90%. Valdiate sites that rank well in your sector. That will show you the value.
Not every validation failure is as devastating as this one, but I've seen some that are even worse. It only makes sense to check, even though search engines do not hand out "gold stars" for validating, the rankings you save by catching and fixing errors may be very real.
Sometimes the most deadly errors can be the hardest to notice without doing a programmatic check.
[edited by: tedster at 10:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2006]
The importance of valid HTML goes far beyond search engine considerations. When you validate, you spot many other serious issues and it forces you to create better and better documents, which can only help digestibility. As you say, product quality. You can't even begin to have a document compatible with accessibility guidelines without valid html.
The quote error tedster mentioned is one of the disasterous things that browsers will forgive you for but search engines might not.
Minor errors can safely be ignored from a search engine perspective. Critical errors MUST be fixed. Other errors should certainly be corrected but if the site works, correctly on all the common browsers, they can be given a lower priority.
Kaled.
