I have never really designed sites that were w3c compliant. But lately I've been working on a new project. I've ensured that all the pages are w3c compliant, the layout is super clean, and loads fast. Does w3c compliance effect your rankings at all? Or is it just efficient coding and good practice...
Yes, according to Google, being W3C compliant can positively affect your SERP positions. I don't think its huge, but every little bit helps.
It helps. Why? Because if a page is valid, it will be most likely shown correctly in all browsers which means the user experience is good and this way you can get more links. Also being a w3c valid means that the designer knows something about the thing and usually does a good job. If one creates a page in some wysiwyg editor that generates megabytes of useless code, and if that page is not human-friendly (image on image, many javascript effects, whatever), no-one will like it. And thus it will get no or minimum links. Well... this is an extreme example, but not everyone is a professional web designer. Still newbies exist... especially students.
Got a link to qualify this statement? I suspect that being standards compliant still has nothing to do with SEO. Google home pages don't even validate. Nigel
I found that when I started using submenu software that didn't validate (and so sites which had previously validated no longer did) this did not effect the serps for those sites. That said, I can understand the arguments for validation mentionned above.
Here's the quote I was thinking of. I actually didn't remember that they said it doens't help directly, so I suppose I am w... wr... wro... not technically accurate. Q: Does validating my site's code (with a tool such as the W3C validator) help my site's ranking in Google? A: No, at least not directly. However, to the extent that cleaning up your HTML makes your site render better in a variety of browsers ( http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=100782 ), more accessible to people with disabilities or folks accessing your pages on portable or other devices, and so on, it can improve the popularity of your site... increasing traffic, natural links to your site (which can help with your Google ranking), and so on. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=46fe0487dc9697f7&hl=en
Thanks for clarifying your point. I don't like to nitpick about this because standards compliance simply makes sense on many levels. That said, merely being standards compliant does not inherently affect SEO. However, it is a really good idea as it largely tends to separate the men from the mice. It also has a direct impact on usability, accessibility etc. I don't like to make a bunch of distinctions between marketing, seo and simply doing things right. They all fall under the same umbrella. Nigel
In my experience it has no direct relation to SEO; in fact search engine crawlers render web pages much differently than web browsers. Search engine crawlers tend to look at a web page in a text-only type format; like the lynx web browser or a screen reader. There is no direct relation to validation and SEO, in fact 80% of all the sites in the top 10 have some sort of validation error. The concept in SelectSpat's last post simply states that a properly validated site will look more useful and proper to visitors and improve natural linking via those people linking to the site which in effect then WOULD directly effect the SEO of your website. You'll be interested to view this video by Matt Cutts regarding this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg (especially around the 1:40 mark)