Should we get our W3 Validation Errors Fixed for SEO. How important is it ?

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

We implement most things on our Website that is recommended and most recently we did Schema.org. However, one area which we haven't done is fix our W3 Validation Errors.

My developer thinks they are not so as such and it's more about ticking the boxes but does anymore have any experience whereby fixing all these did actually have an SEO /Ranking Benefit ?..

Most of our URL'S are indexed and google recrawls regularly so I am not sure as to it's importance.

Also we have a mobile responsive version so I wasn't sure if it more important because of this.

From what I read, I can't see to any benefit from fixing it all but just wanted some other opinions?

thanks

Pete

[Linda-Vassily]

Matt Cutts has said a number of times that invalid HTML in and of itself does not cause a penalty. Here's one example: http://youtu.be/j3KgrbiB1pc

"So Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML because there would be a huge number of webpages like that and some people know the rules and then decided to make things a little bit faster or to tweak things here there and so their pages don't validate and there are enough pages they don't validate that we said OK this would actually hurt search quality if we said only the pages that validate are allowed to rank or rank those a little bit higher."

Yes, you should write good HTML. But, unless it is so bad that it causes a bad user experience, simply having some W3C errors is not going to be a problem for SEO. (At least for now...)

[PeteC12]

Many thanks LindaLV

Pete