Is W3C Validation important for SEO?

scottg

New Member
W3C validation is VERY important for SEO. Google works hand in hand with the W3C in developing its Googlebot spiders that crawl and index the web.

Valid sites have a better chance of search spiders crawling more pages without experiencing hangups. If the spider hits a snag caused by bad code, it will leave and probably not return for a very long time.
 

ddadhi

New Member
validation is important to spider, but not so important, check google self is also not valid but have high rank
 

Beek-IT

New Member
See it as a pie; if you don't follow the recipe correctly, it will never be as good as it can be.
Same goes for a website, W3C will check if you followed that recipe correctly. :)
 

d a v e

New Member
"No, not at all. As long as the markup of the page/site is valid enough to be indexed properly," so, yes then, at least some.
 

v2Media

Member
The topic isn't "Does Valid HTML help SEO" and you can't have "some" W3C validity. The page is either W3C valid, or invalid. W3C validation isn't the same as using valid enough code for the search engines to index the site. Having a bright shiny W3C Valid logo on your footer doesn't get you higher rankings.
 

d a v e

New Member
"W3C validation isn't the same as using valid enough code for the search engines to index the site." isn't it? and i never said some w3c vaildity. i said some valid code (and therefore a degree of w3c validity.)
i'm not quite sure how you can make a distinction between some valid code for indexing and some (i.e. mostly) valid code for w3c validation.
by making the site with fewer coding errors then you are moving towards w3c validation and therefore better indexing (or at least indexing with fewer problems.

you're argument- if i understand it correctly - is that w3c validation isn't important at all, whereas i'm saying a largely valid site (and you surely must see that though a site might not validate because it has 2 errors is not the same as a site that doesn't validate with 100s of errors) is going to have fewer problems that being indexed and therefore aiming for W3c validation is intrinsically tied up with improving indexing.

you said w3c validation is "not at all important" but contradict yourself by saying "As long as the markup of the page/site is valid enough to be indexed properly,"
wouldn't you say that at least running your site through the validator will show any coding errors and therefore any potential problems with indexing?

no-one is talking about "Having a bright shiny W3C Valid logo on your footer" that would look amateurish nowadays anyway :)
 

v2Media

Member
Having your page pass the validation test at w3c does not improve your rankings for that page. Is that clear enough for you to understand dave?

If you have a few ampersands in the copy, or missing a few closing span tags, your site wont pass w3c validation; but more importantly, you wont be penalised by the search engines either.
 

smoovo

New Member
You all right.

Code validation not been processed by the search engine and the page rank doesn't affected by validation, but, if the page won't work correctly because of that wrong code, it could of been indexed with errors.

Some of the errors tells the robot to stop index and skip the rest of the website, and this is real BAD.

Conclusion:
Keep your code clean, very clean as much as you could. Sometimes you just can't because of some browsers bugs, but try your best.

____________________
SMooVo- Web Design
[email protected]
www.SMooVo.com
 

v2Media

Member
A webpage with a lot of 404 links can be perfectly valid html, but very very bad for seo. Or as smoovo indicates, rel="nofollow" on important links can be a costly boo-boo, as well as <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />. Using javascript 'links' is perfectly valid html, but most search engines won't be able to follow them.

The number of high ranking webpages with totally invalid html is evidence that valid html, and especially w3c validation tests, don't particularly matter for serps. As long as the code is valid enough for bots/search engines to index the page properly is the main thing.
 

webdesignperth

New Member
I agree

I agree with v2media. as long as all the markup of the site is valid this shouldnt matter. i've seen heaps of site that failed w3c validation yet doing excellent on search engines.
 

smoovo

New Member
Again, incorrect code doesn't affects page ranking, but still, it has direct affect on the users experience (different browsers, etc...), and this leads to low time on site level. If your users will get mess of content they will not stay.

Other issue is that there are billion of errors that could lead to broke indexing, not just "meta" tags.

The reason for doing SEO is to get more attention from users and more traffic, and if you are doing off-site SEO without on-site (including markup validation), you will fail!

____________________
SMooVo- Web Design
[email protected]
www.SMooVo.com
 

bluecollar01

New Member
W3C validation only ensures that the search engines can read/spider the pages without any issues and does not guarantee indexing.

W3C validation is likely NOT part of any ranking algo but is considered a "best practice" among web designers and developers.
 
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twister

Member
I think that W3C validation is just need to be done not from SEO point of view, just of ethic to other users
 
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