Validated code is a benefit for many reasons. With hundreds of factors determining your rankings, this is most likely one of them. It probably has a very small impact, but is a factor none the less. Why disregard any factor that could effect rankings, especially in competitive markets. Not to mention gaining all those other benefits of validated code.

Those other sites mentioned that have spaghetti code and still rank well, I am willing to bet that other algo factors are overriding the crappy code. Again, I doubt validation has a rather large impact on rankings unless most of the other factors are rather equal.

There are many others aspects of code on a site that have more of an impact than validation, but why in the world would you not make sure it was not an issue, just in case it became a factor.

Many times its a company’s decision not to fix, based on financial, time or resource requirements. This is completely understandable and I would not aggressively push to have it fixed in that case. However, I would always make sure they understood the potential issues related to that decision.

@Edward: Sorry buddy, I cant buy the argument: I know it’s wrong, but I wont fix until someone proves it wrong. Give me a call when you get a chance.

I ~ w3C Validation » Rankings
You ~ Semantic Markup » Rankings

I’ll exit the stage now …

Best regards,

Also, I am not attempting to qualify as substantive evidence, since if I am not talking in my last posts about W3C markup validation.

Once again:
“In a competitive keyword situation I know my marked up correctly site has a better chance at the top spot. That means I use headings correctly, utilize at least the h1, h2 and h3 tags and I make sure the content of each is related in the semantic outline.”

Marked up correctly, does not mean valid markup.

I will give you an example of an incorrect marked up or of a not semantically outlined page:

1. A page has “h2″ headings, and does not have an “h1″ tag.

2. The markup of the footer of a page comes first after the “body” tag or somewhere close to the top, instead of being the last markup of the page.

The above referenced article is referencing factors that have nothing to do with search engine’s preferring w3C validation …

What I believe you are attempting to qualify as substantive evidence … is confusing …

The patent article is related to LSI … How does that correlate w3C validation?

As the claim to the document states,

“identifying documents relating to the query by comparing search terms in the query to an index of a corpus”

Unless I am mistaken … that patent is regarding latent semantic indexing …

Thanks …