W3C Markup Validation - make sure you do it

hmeister

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Ok I thought it was a load of crap as well but it has worked for me.

When I tried to validate my sites with this about 6 weeks ago, none of my sites passed as they were full of my crap coding. A bit of work and now they ALL pass.

What does it mean? Clean code my friends and G loves clean code.

My main site is now number 1 on G for a finance keyword that has 40k searches a month and 27m competing websites. Not only that but I have finally achieved authority status with it and whilst you may say that the W3C had nothing to do with it, I say it has and all of my sites have jumped up G in the last 6 weeks.

If you can, do it. Here is the link
http://validator.w3.org/
 
It's not a big deal for ranking.

Most sites don't validate.
 
But they should.. Most sites i own i have handcoded using valid code throughout. It's also said that Search Engine Spiders often only crawl the first 300 characters of a page, so i can tell you for a fact in those 300 chars most spiders have all my links and keywords. Plus with Valid Code, i can stick my menus at the top in the html, but at the bottom, left or right when the page is viewed by browser.

I don't care what anyone says, valid code is tidy, quick and clean. I'm not sure whether Google likes it more, but i guess they do because they load quicker and work. Always. For one thing, when you write valid code, using valid css, you've clearly made the effort and spiders DO like clean, javascript-free and junk-free code. Fact.
 
Most sites don't validate

Not strictly true. Most sites might not put the icon in their pages to prove it but all of the big sites that dominate the niches would have got professional coders to code their sites, so I am sure they meet the requirements for clean code.

I guess my rank increases were just pure co-incidence then. As with all things SEO, it is the sum of the parts that makes the difference.
 
It's not a big deal for ranking.

Most sites don't validate.

I agree. I think the jump in Google rankings during the last 6 weeks comes from other activities (off page seo, etc.).
 
Although i dont really have a say on whether it counts or not. Gotta remember that googlebot is just that, a bot. Just because you can read it on page doesnt mean that a robot can parse it properly if you havnt got valid code.
 
html tidy-ers are at levels where dirty code is no problem for most coders, and certainly no problem for google.

I agree - it's better, nicer, faster etc but Google doesn't, im my opinion, consider it at all in ranking. It doesn't really tell them that much (related to where a side should appear) anyway.
 
Hi Guys!

First post :) I'm a web-developer/designer trying to start making some real money with IM.

I think that while it's a good practice to develop websites based on standards, search engines don't really care.

Run Amazon, eBay, Zappos or Wikipedia through the validator and you'll see that none of this websites is "clean". Heck, even Google.com isn't valid!

It helps visitors because the site loads faster, it helps you because changing the design or anything is quicker and easier and it *may* help search engines because you can arrange the information better.

I haven't seen any difference in rankings because of clean code in any of my sites or my clients' sites.

Cheers!
 
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