Its important to some extent, to enable the bots to easily crawl your site., i always instruct our coders to validate the codes But its really a tough job to continue it., like when we make changes, updates etc.,
It is important so that google-bot can crowl the site easilly better and understand the content of it.
Google's crawler can mostly only read pages that are W3C compliant so its a good idea to start doing it. As well as that the sites will work better in alternative browsers such as firefox.
Hi , from what Ive seen it important to keep code clean for bots to get through them quickly and retrieve all the content.. I would use W3C to validate but wouldnt worry too much!
Rubbish! Most of the top ranking pages I've checked in Google today failed. Try it yourself. Even this page fails.
I do not know for certain, but I suspect Google's search algorithm may also take into account how people respond to results. Getting clicked on should be a vote in favor of the site, but if the user quickly backs up to the search results and moves on to another page, the algorithm may take note of that and it could have negative impact on a site's ranking. To thte extent that is or is not true, your site would be penalized for not having validated HTML because people having trouble viewing the site will quickly leave it. There is only one valid reason to maintain a site which cannot pass W3C validation -- laziness. I try very hard to make sure the pages resulting from my templates validate. Sometimes things sneak through, but when that is brought to my attention I try to fix it.
Google says, there are several factors are involved in ranking process, When you validate your pages, you make sure that you are in serious business in the eyes of google (Maybe),
I don't see it beeing that important. As long as your site doesn't error in a browser. I've heard that google even codes improperly (b/c think of how many 1000's of gigabytes of BW each character in googles code would save them a day) http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.google.com/
W3C Validation is required for every site. But i don't recommend to spend too much time on it (in terms of SEO). As you can see the most top ranked sites of all Search Engines, doesn't pass the validation test. Just check whether the site is ok with all the browsers are not. If not fix the problem. That's it.
Top ranked sites/ sites running for a long year/already established sites etc., need not even worry about validation., For newly established portals which are into serious business should validate their page
I would say that everyone should ensure that their pages validate, but not for seo. Even Matt Cutts says that W3C validation doesn't matter: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8553629667451959310&hl=en
w3c validator make bots easier read your site but not guaranteed your site ranking. If you've all pages passed w3c you may have a little advantage than others but as Google said, there're many factors involved with its ranking. PS. funny but it's true, even Google itself doesn't pass through w3c validation, see here
It looks good and you can brag about it when you are a webdesigner but I would not worry about it all in terms of SEO. As long as it looks good and the same in all browsers (and used versions) you are ok to go. I recently noticed my blog had 92 errors but still ranks on the first page in google msn and yahoo for the biggest search phrases in my niche. Make it look good and crawlable. that's all
Google Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 "Check for broken links and correct HTML." I know googlebot can handle most errors but it is always good practice to have the least errors as possible on a page. You never know what errors can cause problems, fix the ones you can but don't spend to much time on it.