W3C validation and SEO
W3C Validitaion? To validate or not to validate? That is the question.
Friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that one of my web page isn’t W3C compatible so doesn’t validate correctly. I didn’t carry to much because he isn’t SEO expert, he is web programmer, so I think W3C for some reason is very important to him.
This days, this question for me is completely unavoidable: Is W3C validation important? Sure it is. But, is it important for SEO?!
To be sure, let’s check what google thinks about W3C validation. If you put google.com address in W3C Validator you’ll get this result: 35 Errors, 2 warning(s)
W3C Validation and search engine optimization
In my rich experience I have noticed that many pages which has harder validation errors also have problems witch search engine spiders and bots. In such case that some of them aren’t indexed very well or not indexed at all because googlebot can’t render such bad written web pages.
Simple conclusion is that such kind of validation errors you should fix immediately. For other smaller or soft W3C validation errors, like the use of target=”_blank” with strict document type, don’t waste your time and money on them. If you client insist on W3C validation and they want to pay for it, just do it, otherwise you can freely ignore it.
Keep in mind thath validating of your web page trough W3C Validation doesn’t change your content and relevance for searched keywords.
W3C Validation & web programming/design
Let me explain, W3C validation has two types of errors. Hard validation errors and soft validation errors. An example of hard validation error will be for example an unclosed tag or any other tag elements. This can cause very serious issues, and such pages will for sure cause different problems on different web browsers. From look and design to functionality.
In my opinion good written and designed web page must have zeros of validation errors or very small number of such errors.
In other hand, don’t torture yourself to have clean and 100% W3C Validated web page. Keep your code clean, organized and after each big change, test your page in all popular web browsers. Starting from Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.
To validate or not to validate?
Big web companies such as google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com doesn’t validate very well or in other words they have validation errors. Most of SEO experts agree with conclusion that having code that isn’t properly nested or has hard validation errors is for sure not good for SEO. Also, most of them agree that your web page will not have better ranking position if pass W3C validation with 100% success or 0 errors.
As final word, I would like to say keep your code and web page nice and clean, fix errors which cause bad rendering or parses issues. Check your web page at least on Firefox and Google Chrome, I other hand I do prefer Opera, so for me check it also in Opera. You can ignore Internet Explorer because every version has different problems. But anyway have in mind that more than 1/3 of Internet population still use some version of IE.