I have been working on my site now for over 18 months. I believe I have finally stopped all duplicate URLs and everything is good. Yesterday i noticed that Google had 14500 pages indexed for my site which I though was odd as the site has only 8000 odd pages. I realised that somehow search results were showing in the index - duplicate content. Now I have used the robots.txt to filter out anything with a ? in the url - hopefully this should solve it. This got me thinking about other potential errors. I went to http://validator.w3.org, on the advice of a friend, and stuck in my URL I see I have 116 errors showing. Most of which I do not have a clue about. This error is at the top: This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional! Followed by a whole long list. Is this something I should be worrying about? Should I strive to get 0 errors? and can it affect my rankings if this is not correct? Any advise would be apprecited - my url is www dot jbosolutions dot co.uk Cheers
There are chances that the people with disabilities will visit your website therefore it is important that you should adhere the W3 standards.
I can help you with the markup errors. Since you're uisng an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE, start by removing the spaces and trailing slashes from your META tags. In other words <tag /> should become <tag> Then re-validate (often times an error will trigger several false positives, which can be removed by fixing the original problem). Next get rid of the margin attributes in your <body> tag. Instead, go to your stylesheet and remove the margins there. body { margin: 0; padding: 0; } Code (markup): Should take care of it. Though I prefer to use a universal reset at the top of my stylesheet to remove the margins and padding from everything except buttons, inputs and select/option elements. Next replace all instances of language="JavaScript 1.2" with type="text/javascript" Re-check for validation. Once you've done that, go into your code and make sure that ALL attribute values have straight quotation marks (like " and " not the curly quotes that word processors love to use) and re-check for validation. Most (if not all) of the false positives should be gone by this point. If you have any problems with a border attribute not belonging on images, remove them, and put this near the top of your stylseheet: img { border: 0; vertical-align: bottom; } Code (markup): That'll take care of THAT problem nicely. If you still need help afterword, please PM me (don't worry, I don't charge for help here on the forums - unless you choose to hire me as a developer) and I'll be more than happy to help you out.
i've always worried about this myself but if you look at most pages out there they all have w3c errors. it's not a big thing, but if it makes you sleep better at night go ahead and fix them.
Strictly from a search engine perspective it's not a big deal, but if you remember that getting the people to your site is just the first battle in the war, you'll start to realize how important it really is.
I first had few hundred errors for my site which I corrected few months back, but till now I havnt seen any change in my sites search placement
Ok great I will begin to do these steps What exactly is HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE? And what would the other options be? Thanks for the excellent help
This is an example of an HTML 4.01 Strict DOCTYPE. It goes above the HTML element. Nothing should ever go above this, not even white space. An opening HTML tag is included for the sake of completeness: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html lang="en"> Code (markup): This is an XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE. If you're not serving your pages as real XHTML, then the same rule as above applies here: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en"> Code (markup): Notice that the <html> tag has an XML namespace and an XML :lang attribute in it. The lang="en" attribute is for HTML compatibility when serving it as regular HTML. Both languages have their own rules, and are generally similar to each other, but they do have some unique differences. Unless you're willing to learn about XHTML (even if you're going to serve it as HTML), I suggest you stick with HTML, but remember to quote all your attribute values, use lower case, and so forth just to improve the readability of your code. Oh and regardless of what you do, don't forget to indent/deindent your code when needed.
I had websites go to #1 with errors, and I also had websites go to #1 with no errors. However, I have noticed that some of the websites that pass w3c validation get crawled more frequently, which makes sense, since page loads faster in the eyes of a spider. You might not see a big difference if you make your website completely error free, but it will definitely not hurt you if it is error free, it can only do good.