W3C Validation: How Important is This to Ranking

[maxcarnage]

Hi,

I'm currently working with a developer who is trying to tell me that validation errors and warnings are of little to no importance in a website's SERP.

In the past, whenever I've had a site that was experiencing problems ranking for a keyword terms, this was one of the first places we'd look.

Is this still a relatively important component in getting a site to rank?

[Shakur]

Hey ya! You can find a great disccusion right here www.searchenginejournal.com/w3c-validation-for-seo-myth-and-reality/18566/

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey luckybluebox!

IMO, this is rather important aspect of proper development and we make sure every site we work on is W3C compliant. These are typically easy fixes and should always be cleaned up.

Check out this youtube video from Google Webmasters channel. They say it is NOT a ranking factor but I would always suggest keeping things tidy

Hope this helps you out!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XlKn6I9rSc

[adamxj2]

Hello

While there are good reasons to validate your code, it does not directly affect your rankings. Matt Cutts talks about this in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Validation does give insight into your development needs and will help you to improve user experience. However broken code won't take away from good content and that is primarily what search engines are looking for.

[EGOL]

W3C Validation: How Important is This to Ranking?

It depends who you ask.

If you ask one of the W3C evangelists they will tell you that you will never get good rankings without it and that google will penalize your website and not allow it to be seen in certain countries.

If you ask people who really know about this stuff they will tell you that if your site renders well in most browsers you will do fine in search.

[Travis_Bailey]

Seconding EGOL's statement, for the most part.

Years ago, The Matt Cutts stated W3C valid code wasn't a ranking factor. There's been a bit of debate over the years, but there still isn't much evidence to support W3C validation itself as a ranking factor. So it's something you probably can put on the back burner for more pressing concerns.

Honestly, sometimes errors are flagged simply because a comment or two are a little wonky. But that won't really inhibit how competitive a site is. If the site has 'quite a few' errors and warnings, that could potentially decrease site speed. Site speed is a ranking factor.

I suppose my best answer is; "No, it's not a ranking factor itself. Though there's some potential for poor coding to harm something that is a ranking factor."

[MoosaHemani]

I will totally agree with EGOL's idea. If the website speed time is fine you don't really have to go for all the non important code ethics and everything.

[webmethod]

A developer who tells you "W3C validation isn't important" is like a house builder telling you "Those small cracks in the walls are nothing to worry about"

George

[IM_Learner]

I would worry more about Google guidelines and best practices rather than wasting time on W3C validation.

[adamxj2]

Indeed! I'd be more concerned as a developer that there are glitches even if it won't affect SEO. Bad business

[Bryan_Loconto]

Man... That's what I'm talking about George!!

[JVRudnick]

What Egol said is quite true...this has been debated for years....but those of us who don't care about the validations rank our own or our clients sites quite nicely.

Oh sidebar - you'd be so surprised to learn what kind of HUGE well known sites won't validate either....

[adamxj2]

Exactly…. Google is the first one that comes to mind!

[maxcarnage]

Bryan,

I'm going to give you an example of one of the site pages after I run it through W3C validator. Would you mind having a look at it and telling me how highly I should prioritize fixing these issues?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawtonmd.com%2Fprocedures%2Fbreasts%2Faugmentation&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

The developer I'm working with on this site is telling me that these issues are a very low priority, but as I'm seeing throughout the threads, his lack of interest in repairing these issues is of some concern to me.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Absolutely! I will dig into this tonight and give you my honest feedback. Something I did notice that I would make a top priority is the load time of the page/site.

Upon opening the page, I noticed it took a quite a bit to load. After running through Pingdom & Page Speed Insights (links below), I'd make the load time fixes a top priority for your developer.

Pingdom Test Results

Google Page Speed Insights

I would jump all over these first and foremost but I will look through the html errors tonight and get back to you!