Does WC3 Validation have any affect on how well you rank in Google? Also, does it possibly coax Google to spider your page more thouroughly? I've had some troubles getting a deep crawl, G has only indexed my main page so far, so I just went through the validation and made my code acceptable. Just wondering if this really has any bearing on how search engines follow links or rank your site.
Clean code, yes help and complicated, bad code may affect you rank, but WC3 validation is something else.
google doesn't validate... so I suppose they should be sympathetic to those who don't validate either.
In general from what ive seen it works for a handfull of people, most people notice no effect and ive found 1 guy who actually lost a lot of ranking because he validated, but I think he had something like a paragraph of text in a title tag by mistake.
I wouldn't doubt that being validated could ultimately serve as a "tie-breaker" among other sites that are not validated, but equally optimized.
W3C validation doesn't affect rank, but is goot to have valid pages. Because you won't have problems on browsers