Hi, I have been told that if there are any validation errors, (no matter how little), Google will punish you and no matter how good you page looks their bots will slowly drop you into the unknown. Is that true? I have a site currently ranked about 100 and with a PR2. I will fix all the reported errors and see if the site moves up the rankings. I will not change anything else. What do you think? Is Google punishing bad HTML code? I am not talking about strange JavaScript code here, simple, straight forward HTML mistakes, (<img> without a title and so on). FFMG
It is a crap shoot. I've even seen websites listed in google with crummy javascript errors. It is just good practice to keep code in check though.
I think terrible code may be punished but a few validation errors I wouldn't of thought will matter. Check googles code for validation, they don't have erros but have a lot of warnings. Kinda shows that they aren't that into perfect W3C standards
I don't think validation errors are such a big issue. However it looks more professional so I would invest some time to fix all small issues. Until the navigation is working fine and the crawlers can do their job, it's OK.
The fact that your code doesn't validate doesn't matter to the search engines. But broken code can cause a page to be incorrectly indexed or not indexed at all, which certainly can damage your rankings. So validating your code is a good idea just to avoid errors, not because the search engines will punish you if your code isn't perfect.
I agree with those who disagree...-). I too have seen many websites that have javascript errors and still rank highly. I does make sense nevertheless to have error free code as it also discourages users who may not confidence in your company if they spot errors. It certainly is not good for your brand.
Of course you should strive to have clean, correct code. But whoever told you that even minor errors will be punished by G does not know what they are talking about. It is absolutely false. /*tom*/