On the few forums I have posted my site http://www.smartmindmedia.com for review there always seems to be one poster that says something about my site not validating from http://validator.w3.org/ What does it matter if a site doesn't validate. Try top sites like yahoo or google and they have hundreds of errors. Can anyone explain this to me?
I would like an expert opinion on this as well.. My uneducated guess is as long as it looks okay, and it is not causing search engines to hang up it is fine. People will talk about it potentially causing problems with future upgrades, but lets burn those bridges when we come to them. I am interested in the impact on there here and now.
W3C validation is no more and no less than a set of suggestions or recommendations for HTML standards. They're not even new in most cases. And they include certain designated "deprecated" elements that are perfectly fine. The sole advantage of running your pages through a validator is that it may catch certain coding errors like mismatched tags, missing closing tags, that sort of thing. Any other "errors" it finds can almost always be safely ignored. As long as the page is readable and has no glaring errors that make it uninterpretable, search engines couldn't care less whether a page validates or doesn't validate, or about the W3C group either. It won't have the slightest effect on SE rankings.
I just use w3.org to check my sites for errors like open tags or stuff like that, I couldn't care less if I validate or not, most of my sites are a total mess in the coding, but the spiders can go through it and that is all that matters
many sites aren't W3 validated. try to validate the top 10 pages for your target keywords to see what you'll come up with.
I would like to think that validation does play a part but as these other wise-folks have said, there's no solid evidence to prove this at the moment.
What does validation has to do with user experience? Do you ever test a page for validation before reading the content there? The validation plays part in rankings is nonsense.
No the W3C validation does not affect your page rank... Errors in coding can however - so it is well to check those items that are critical to site performance.