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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:
Posted under Web Design on March 16th, 2010 by Paul Barnes / No Comments
If you have a website, are you certain that it is being presented consistently on all the major browsers on all platforms?
If not, you may be losing a large chunk of your potential audience. How on Earth do you go about rectifying this? Spend hours fixing a bug on one browser only to find it creates more bugs on another browser?
Many professional web developers are increasingly tied up with testing web page markup/code on a multitude of browsers across Mac and PC platforms so the best way to minimise this is to build web pages correctly from the very start.
The W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium provide a validation tool for both the general markup of a webpage and also for the styling(css) of a site. By adhering to this simple tool, a potential cascade of bugs, errors and under-performance can be averted. Here’s some more detail from the W3C site itself…
Validation as a debugging tool
While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML “tag soup”, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, different software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.
Using standard, interoperable markup and stylesheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one’s page handled consistently across platforms and user-agents.
Indeed, most developers creating rich Web applications know that reliable scripting needs the document to be parsed by User-Agents without any unexpected error, and will make sure that their markup and CSS is validated before creating a rich interactive layer.
When surveyed, a large majority of Web professionals will state that validation errors is the first thing they will check whenever they run into a Web styling or scripting bug.
Validation as a future-proof quality check
Checking that a page “displays fine” in several contemporary browsers may be a reasonable insurance that the page will “work” today, but it does not guarantee that it will work tomorrow.
In the past, many authors who relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0. Whilst Internet Explorer initially set out to be bug-compatible with Netscape, it too has moved towards standards compliance in later releases.
Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with Web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantee that future Web platforms will handle it as designed.
Validation eases maintenance
It is reasonable to consider that standards such as HTML and CSS are a form of “coding style” which is globally agreed upon. Creating Web pages or applications according to a widely accepted coding style makes them easier to maintain, even if the maintenance and evolution is performed by someone else.
Validation helps teach good practices
Many professionals have been authoring the Web with HTML and CSS for years and know these technologies by heart. Beginners and students, on the other hands, will find automated checking tools invaluable in spotting mistakes. Some teachers also stress that automated validation tests are a good introduction to broader, more complex quality concepts such as accessibility.
Validation is a sign of professionalism
As of today, there is little or no certification for Web professionals, and only few universities teach Web technologies, leaving most Web-smiths to learn by themselves, with varied success.
Seasoned, able professionals will take pride in creating Web content using semantic and well-formed markup, separation of style and content, etc. Validation can then be used as a quick check to determine whether the code is the clean work of a seasoned HTML author, or quickly hacked-together tag soup.
