Markup Validation Service

mickeyco

Link to free W3C Markup Validation Service, it checks your website for errors. Someone was just telling me that a valid page will rank higher with search engines, I don't really know, but I suppose it would be good to eliminate errors. Give your site a check.

http://validator.w3.org/

mickeyco

Anyone try this?

How'd you do?

Any opinions from the Techies about errors and search engine ranking, I always thought it wouldn't really matter, but was recently told otherwise, just curious.

DamionR

w3C compliance is the standard in coding.

Regardless of what programming language or system is used to create your website... running it through w3c is a smart idea.

Clean code will NOT help you rank in the search engines. It will help you avoid NOT ranking though. Hopefully that made sense.

In other words... bad can can hurt your rankings. Good code does not help them. It's sort of expected.

mickeyco

That's about what I was told recently, bad code (non compliant) will hurt, I thought it was BS (still not sure) because I have seen non compliant pages (ones I have done) that come up fine in searches. I ran some big name sites through the W3C validation and they were not compliant and came up fine in google. Maybe it's the number or type of errors? I found a few articles that say the same thing about it hurting and the possibility of not having the page ranked or included in search engines. Regardless I thought it was a great link to verify your html or find the errors and correct them.

DamionR

Right now.. I count over 120 factors that affect rankings in search engines.

Each one of these have varying weights.

So you can have "bad code", but still rank well because of other factors that outweigh this.

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Nathan

If they look at bad code I'm screwed

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Nathan

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

DamionR

I just looked at my first site I did - done in Front page - and about threw up. God it's horrid. I'm not a "code monkey", but I can see all kinds of bloat in the code.

Thank God for notepad

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AaronO

There was a study done about a year ago where they took one website that was compliant and another that was just done horribly. With all the same content. The one with the horrible code actually ranked better in Google.

Meaning - Google either doesn't care about compliancy and/or they actually value poor coding...

I'll try to find it and post the link...

If you think of the latter it would make sense. If Google really wants to give everyone a fair shot in search engines, why would they exclude the person who can't follow validation codes, even though their site has relevant, unique content?

BTW -"CODE MONKEY"???

Don't tell me your a JoCo fan....

DamionR

I agree- it's a minimal factor. I look more for "problems" - ie, broken links... all tags closed.. etc.

Joco? What's that? I'm guessing I'm not

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AaronO

CODE MONKEY - Jonathan Coulton was a developer who I used to work with and is now some strange musician who has a cult following around the country... His music is entertaining, if anything. The "code monkey" comment just reminded me of one of his songs...