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Posted under E-commerce, SEO, Web Design, Search Marketing on February 2nd, 2012 by Paul Barnes / No Comments
Google spokesperson Matt Cutts (speaking in this video on the topic) maintains that demoting web pages that don’t validate to the W3C standard is not something Google will ever consider.
Moreover, Google’s own page doesn’t validate, nor is it possible to achieve validation with the Google +1 button without a workaround.
So why do many “SEO experts” argue that Google values compliant web pages?
The cynical view is that some companies throw every subject but the kitchen sink into SEO recommendations to a) appear knowledgable and b) justify their fees. Many also claim that compliant code will work in any browser and take less time for a spider to crawl the page and take the data out.
However, we know that browsers do an excellent job of rendering web pages with non-compliant code, a fact endorsed by Matt Cutts in his video.
He goes on to make the point also that Google remains focused on delivering the most appropriate content to its users and precluding websites because of the odd HTML error could be a slippery slope.
Despite the jury being out on Google’s use of validation in its ranking algorithm, there are still very sound reasons why compliant code is good:
Whilst there may be a legitimate reason why a web page won’t validate (such as a Google +1 button script), on the whole, bad validation = bad housekeeping. It’s sloppy and unnecessary.
If your web development team isn’t attempting to make your site compliant, or at least fix the errors that really matter, what else are they skipping and keeping quiet about?
There can be a relation between certain validation errors and slower page loading. As page loading speed is one of Google’s primary ranking factors we would state that starting a build by validating the HTML forms a solid foundation to build an effective web presence.
Compliant code doesn’t guarantee cross-browser compatibility in itself but it’s a great start to making sure your web site pages display correctly in the following browsers:
