Does W3C compliance impact a site’s search rankings? The question has been mulled on Search Engine Journal in the past and the basic conclusion is that although W3C is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability, it does not have a direct impact on Google rankings, especially since Google’s pages themselves do not validate.
However, it is still a common practice to make sure one’s pages do validate W3C standards, and in the future, in an effort to judge site authority and quality, Google may just include W3C validity in their algorithm; you never know.
Besides, believe it or not, there is much more to the web than only Google. And Yahoo, Ask.com & MSN’s Live Search are also major traffic generators in the Global search market.
Additionally, if you’re going to be running a social media campaign, planning on running a story on Digg, and the majority of Digg users use a browser such as Safari or Firefox which your site may not load correctly in or results in botched CSS formatting, your story is going to get no attention and you’ll be missing out on the potential of hundreds of organic editorial links.
So, when looking at the whole picture; presentation is reality is reputation… and having a smooth and valid site is critical to your company’s reputation.
Mike Tekula of New Sun Graphics sent Search Engine Journal a write-up of the importance of valid source code and SEO and here are some of his tips in assuring the search engines can properly read your site’s coding and browser compatibility. Enjoy.
- Testing your web pages in browsers is an absolutely necessary process for building any web page. It allows you to see what others can see, and often you will notice mistakes in your HTML code because of the symptoms they cause in browsers. But what about when your testing browser(s) display the pages exactly as you intended. Are your pages error-free? Not necessarily.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide tools to validate your code for free. So do some third-parties. The question you might be asking is, “if my page looks fine in Internet Exporer, Safari, Firefox, etc. why do I need to worry about validation?” If all you’re looking is for proper display, you might not have to. However, if you’re concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and you probably should be, validating your source code is a necessity.
One reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders “crawl” the web indexing web pages and their content. They are basically toned-down web browsers that aren’t concerned with displaying for a user but with recognizing content. In other words, search engine spiders are looking at the same code your web browser is and parsing it in a very similar way. This difference in functionality, however, is vast.
There is a very real pressure on web browser developers to ensure that their browsers display pages correctly to the user. This often includes forgiving errors in the source code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, unrecognized parameters - these are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your web page’s display in your favorite browser. When it comes to search engine spiders, however, it can be an entirely different story.
That is not to say that small errors in your HTML code will spell death for your search engine rankings. Certainly they won’t normally make your page invisible to spiders.
They can, however, disrupt the vastly important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible. And since so much of SEO is paying close attention to every little detail of your site and its content, why leave the possibility open of causing problems for search engines when they try to index your pages?
Validation might mean some big headaches when you set out to fix every last error on your pages, but the benefits of valid code are clear - and running your pages through a validation service like that of the W3C can do a lot in the way of educating you about the mistakes you may be making.
So, in a nutshell, here are some basic tips:
- Use W3C to make sure your site is viewable in major browsers, especially Firefox & Safari
- Test your site on mobile browsers
- Check for all errors in HTML coding and fix them when possible
- Pay attention to your programming errors and be aware of them when programming your next site
- If you pay for a designer, put something in the contract that the site must pass W3C validation.
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
Comments
17 responses so far ↓
Michael Martinez on Jun 22, 2007 at 12:03 pm
This is absolute nonsense. HTML validation has absolutely nothing to do with establishing relevance. The search engines will judge “quality” on the basis of popularity and precedence of relevant content (as determined by user queries).
One might as well argue that using JPEG images is better for search than using TIFF images for some obscure technical prejudice.
The W3C may be striving to accomplish very worthwhile goals, but the facts remain that most people create Web content without any knowledge of the standards recommendations made by the W3C, toolmakers implement features and behaviors that go beyond the W3C recommendations, and search engines just have to deal with the Web as it is, not as W3C compliance advocates want it to be.
W3C compliance should be implemented for the users, to improve accessibility and usability, and that’s it. There is no compelling reason for any search engine to ever score relevance on the basis of HTML coding styles.
Robert Wyatt on Jun 22, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Wow, sounds like someone doesn’t follow recommendations and therefore thinks that no one else ought to! http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michael-martinez.com%2F
Are there valid statistics for what “most people” do?
Michael Martinez on Jun 22, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Robert Wyatt asked: “Are there valid statistics for what ‘most people’ do?”
You mean like these?
http://code.google.com/webstats/
They examined 1,000,000,000 pages. How many have you looked at?
Robert Wyatt on Jun 22, 2007 at 4:13 pm
1) That page lists occurrences of W3C-approved tags; it doesn’t list percentages of compliance, nor does it list what most people have knowledge of.
2) That page uses SVG and suggests use of one particular browser (Firefox 1.5) because it is otherwise unusable.
3) How many pages have I looked at? Well, I’ve looked at your page and found over 60 errors starting with the fact that it had no doctype.
Now, whether this has anything to do with search engines I couldn’t say, but I also don’t see how you could.
Take care,
Robert
Michael Martinez on Jun 22, 2007 at 4:23 pm
You obviously didn’t read through the entire study, which examines a large number of non-standard uses and explains why Google doesn’t require compliance and cannot require compliance in determining which pages are most relevant to user queries.
Your condescending tone is actually quite typical of compliance advocates who clearly haven’t grasped the fundamental principles of search indexing technology. It’s not the code that matters; it’s the content.
I don’t have time to monitor this discussion further today.
As far as my Web site goes, it renders. That’s all I care about. W3C recommendations cannot transform the realities of the Web. Anyone who wants to be a compliance snob is certainly welcome to be.
But W3C compliance has absolutely no impact on SEO.
Robert Wyatt on Jun 22, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I’m sorry you felt I was condescending in advocating standards. I feel like your argument is akin to telling my boss that it doesn’t matter what time I get to meetings, only whether the meeting took place. The analogy refers to time zone standards and whether realities conform to them or vice-versa. Around here we’d say you’re all hat and no cattle. I’d guess I’m also a timezone snob in your book. I’m okay with that.
Gary T on Jun 23, 2007 at 2:40 am
I agree that compliance to these standards is important, but look at the hard work involved for not very impressive returns. Most pages (if or not they comply with the standards) display properly in firefox and IE which are the most popular browsers, unless the coding is real crap. SEs don’t place importance on these standards. Very less motivation for me to adapt to these standards which involves extra work.
Gerard McGarry on Jun 25, 2007 at 3:27 am
I’ve always understood web standards to be good for SEO because they improve crawlability, remove extraneous code and make the page easier to index.
Plus, I remember reading somewhere that this tied into Google’s mission to make the world’s information accessible to all.
However, I find it hard to believe that search engine spiders haven’t evolved to the point where they can ignore the odd un-nested tag or a bit of invalid code. The spiders are (literally) at the forefront of search - it’s hard to believe search engines don’t spend as much time developing them as they do their algorithims.
Jaan Kanellis on Jun 25, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Validating makes sense to do, but doesnt have an effect on ranking a web page. If Google demoted websites that had invalid code the web would be a very, very, very different looking animal.
Relocation on Jun 26, 2007 at 11:40 am
I agree with Jaan Kanellis. Search engines need some time to support it.
Ricardo on Jun 26, 2007 at 11:40 pm
I think standards are the way to do “good” and correct things, and people who want to accomplish with them are looking for that. Spiders or not, the web must be a built as a better place for everyone.
David Wolf on Aug 7, 2007 at 11:55 am
While compliance is not required, it deserves a bonus. Our algorithms reward a well-coded and meta-rich document much more than trash produced by children using frontpage.
High source code quality IS correlated to strong ranking, but perhaps not causal and only a symptom of effective internet operations.
Albert on Dec 3, 2007 at 8:54 pm
At least, this affects to a certain degree, because if your website is well programmed, you’ll get receive more visitors (multi-browsers sites!). It HAS to impact -for good- somehow.
Josh on Apr 17, 2008 at 1:29 am
Ha the pages for this website and Mike Tekula of New Sun Graphics, which “…sent Search Engine Journal a write-up of the importance of valid source code and SEO..” dont validate..
BOTH OF THESE PAGES DONT VALIDATE and they’re talking about how it’s important to have valid pages for SEO. Almost as funny as the nerds having heated arguments through comments about some useless google study.
Tom on May 5, 2008 at 1:35 am
The Web sites must be always validated against W3C standards regardless of the SEO effect, because such sort of programming style indicates about the professional approach used in the Web design company and skills of the team in particular. The output generated will look greater in all browsers and this benefits the end users as well.
Clark Smith on Jun 5, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Great Article, My website doesn’t rank the best for w3c Validation but i’m ranking #1 for my main keywords. Where are some low costing companies that can fix these errors without changing the appearence of the site? Thanks!
Dual Diagnosis on Jun 23, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Mine has about 22 errors but is ranking better than sites that DO validate, I don’t really belive it matters.
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