hi my question is w3c validation important for seo? I read few articles about w3c validation many people write its very important but when i chick some big and high pr website w3c validation many error's plz share your experience about w3c.. Thanks Hafeez Baig
If you’re code is valid then you know that any rendering issues are down to the browser. If your code isn’t valid you’re making life hard for yourself and anyone else who has to work on the project. As you’ll never know if it’s the bad code or a browser bug, or possible the both combined! But that’s mainly for the big errors. Using an un-escaped ‘&’ in a URL will cause the page not to validate but it wont actually break the page. You should also consider that there is a legal requirement for websites to meet priority level 1 (so A standard) and part of this is the code has to be W3C valid within Europe. In the US you need to meet a subset of this called 501. So I guess it depends on client requirements. But to my mind, it’s too easy, if you’re writing HTML from scratch to write valid code, so why not? I don’t find it takes longer and you know you’ve provided the client with a professional services. Now with WP and some plugins this isn’t always possible of course… If a client needs to use target=”_blank” and iFrames then change the doctype to transitional, problem solved!
No... Because there are big websites which have several validation errors and warnings... Like Tutor peace said , w3c validation helo you to check the rendering of your website in browsers. If your site is not rendered properly, what ever you do you can not increase the traffic. Lack of pro[er rendering also increases the bounce rate. In WordPress and all w can not relay on w3c validation because we use so many plugins which may result in w3c validation errors. More than w3c validation, you should be more concentrated on the result of "Fetch as Google and render" in the Google webmaster Tool.
- I have always felt that having clean code is best for SEO - In my personal option as an experienced Google SEO Expert: Valid website code can help with search engine optimization! - Many sites have lots of validation errors, but as we know not every code compliancy and validation error is the same. Some errors could help indicate what problems "should be fixed" but, fixing many errors seems to be more of a challenge than most websites owners, webmasters, and search engine optimization experts, may expect after getting started with the process. ...so they tend not even bother trying to fix/repair the code compliancy problems, or in some cases they just don't even bother to check at all! Clean validated website code is able help search engine bots like GoogleBot, crawl sites / pages easier and with less confusion, increasing its ability to efficiently navigate though a website with ease. It also helps insure full compatibility with all web browsers, insuring that new visitor are able to view the website, once they find it. Yes, many websites are able to rank above others with clean code, but develop new websites with clean code, as well as maintaining website code properly, to keeping it fully complaint is always the best option for better search engine results at Google.com
Think about it logically. The bots that the search engines send out to your sites don't view the pages visually the way we do - they have to read the code and decipher it. They will be smart about the code in the same way that your browser will BUT why make it harder for the program to index the pages when with a bit of attention to detail you can get rid of those errors?
We do always validate HTML and CSS + we do optimize images and finally we do check for broken links. This way we was working to get Panda out, and this way we do with new websites.