This was the question that I was trying to answer myself after I have redesigned my theme and I noticed that not everything was perfect. When I started analyzing my home page, I’ve noticed that a lot of html validation errors existed. When I tried to analyze deeper an article, the amount of errors doubled and I really started to freak out thinking that my SEO would be greatly affected and I would not receive too many visitors from Google.
After analyzing what the errors consisted of, I have started to correct some of them, but regardless of how many I was fixing, others kept popping out. Then it crossed my mind that it would be a good idea to analyze some of the bigger sites that I was visiting to see how W3C Validation Affects their SEO. After doing an analysis on 3-4 sites I saw that all had problems with html errors but still they received a lot of visitors from Google and had a high PR. Then, just to be sure, I looked for the opinion of some respected SEO’s regarding the subject.
Respected SEO’s on W3C Validation:
1. Aaron Wall, of SEOBook:
If you want to get links from web designers who charge high rates then W3C validation is important to SEO, otherwise it has little direct importance outside of ensuring proper rendering to end users. When one visits Amazon.com or Google or Yahoo! (or just about any billion Dollar+ internet company) they will find a website that doesn’t validate. Why is that?
2. Brent Payne, SEO Director for Tribune
I like to keep errors under 25 or so, though Tribune has 100+ errors. Perfect code, I don’t think is necessary but you don’t want to have too malformed of HTML. Some say it is a ranking factor, I say you just don’t want to have stuff that is too unexpected for the bots.
3. Dennis Goedegebuure, Senior Manager & Head of SEO at eBay Inc.
It depends on the type of errors and how many, it all depends on whether the crawler can actually read the real content of the page.
4. Matt Cutts the official voice of Google
Here is a video with what Matt has to say regarding the problems:
With Respect to Effect of W3C Validation over SEO
As you can see from the above testimonials, validation has no direct impact over SEO and you will not receive any bonus from Google. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to fix some of the problems to make the site more appealing to the visitors and have a really speedy website.
Just try not to lose too many hour over this and just let it be.
Hi Dragos, interesting article. Till now, I really cared about the W3C Validation and when I first read the title, I thought its going to be very important to get this validation. But now I am pretty clear that we don’t need to worry about this validation when it comes to SEO. Thanks for the tips.
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I was in the same position as you, thats why I have done the research. Thanks for reading my article.
Thanks for the research,actually I was thinking to learn about w3validation.Now i should stick with wp super cache for my page loading fast.Anyway I am new here and not to enter in complicated things right now.Thanks for your share,at least it remove some stress from me.
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Glad to be of help, but I think you should take a look to W3 Total Cache is the best plugin to help you with your site speed. Also you can take a look on one of my articles, I think it will help you a lot: http://www.bitdoze.com/wordpress/make-your-site-really-fast-with-self-hosted-cdn-and-google-cdn/
Thanks for your articles.Ya I have installed w3 super cache plug-in for my new wordpress website.
Blogging Park last post ..Earn as much from microworker
I haven’t seen any change in page rank for site that don’t validate..I think Google really just don’t are too much about it..
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
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I think W3C validation only means that your sites/blogs will be perfectly shown when open it in web browser.
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Hey, I thought you were going to include the video from Matt Cutts. I hope you can find it and add it to the post. Good job and thanks!
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Hi Ileane, Sorry about that, my girlfriend corrected the article and when she saved it again, the video disappeared (it is a WordPress bug). I have inserted the video again. Thanks for letting me know
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Dragos, You should try the Embed.ly plugin. It makes embedding videos and Tweets a breeze.
I’m going to check out Matt Cutts now. Thanks.
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I don’t believe there are any SEO benefits in W3C validation, but like you say it is beneficial in making a site load faster and also to make a website better fo rvisitors in many respects.
I agree with your thought. There are no any benefits trough W3C validation. but after fixing W3C validation, your site will reduce loading time and it will work faster.
Thanks for the research. I had only been mildly bothered by validation issues before. Now I will just forget about it since the blog software or plug-ins are probably responsible for html errors. It doesn’t pay to try to fix the plug-ins since they get updated frequently anyway.
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Thanks for the research. It is an interesting article, however, I have to point out that google is not the only search engine. And yes, while they hold the majority of market share, they do not dictate the standards in which the web operates; that’s the job of the w3c.
“Separating content from presentational data alone isn’t guaranteed to help search engine optimization efforts, but it is a step towards the issue and SEO benefits of HTML semantics.
For example, a page that uses tables for layout purposes is going against the fundamental rule of Web Standards. Table based page layouts weave presentational data throughout a page’s source code, adding a tremendous amount of code bloat, and have all sorts of other nasty effects, notably much more time-consuming and costly site redesigns. ” writes Matt on March 9th 2011 in his article “W3C Validation for SEO? Separating Facts From Fiction” which was published on http://www.springboardseo.com.
As the article on this page points out, even though validation doesn’t impact your site positively or negatively with google; validation does impact how bots and spiders rank you with other engines, due to the efficient use of code which separates of page and element placement from actual content. This translates to quicker rankings; however, w3c compliance does not guarantee ranking alone. You still need to adhere to other tactics and strategies that need to be worked on a regular basis if not daily.
Lauren Baker explains it best in his article “SEO & Importance of Valid Source Code (W3C Validation)” published on the Search Engine Journal’s website; “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…”.
In the end, it is best practice to maintain separation of presentation and content in conjunction with SEO tactics-strategies.
Dragos you have saved me a few hours of pointless editing, a major plus from me. I do a few SEO report checks every week and these issues always crop up with the reports stating that I will be penalised for them. If you tell me that this is not the case then who am I to argue?
Great piece, many thanks.
Warren
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W3C validation helps in the matter of a visitors opinion, it helps make the experience more enjoyable and they are likely to return.
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1.) Page Load Speed is explictly a Google SEO factor, and many of the W3C validator problems go away with concise, modern code that loads faster.
2.) Don’t spend hours on a minor noncomplaince issue that doesn’t effect the way the page displays on popular, existing browsers. But, fix the stuff that takes 5 seconds (unencoded ampersands, etc)!
Thanks for your article. I have bit worried about validation factor of my website. You article gave clear idea about this validation. Even yahoo is having many errors and warnings. After reading your article I got this information. Thanks.
thanks for this wonderful article. i personally was much shocked to see over 250 errors on my page. tried to to work myself around but couldn’t get it below 27. but now after reading i also tried to test some of the other big sites and to my surprise they even didn’t pass the validation test. so i guess i will leave it here as getting 100% validation rule seems like impossible to me. Love Sms