This was the question that I was trying to answer myself after I have redesigned my theme and I noticed that not everything was perfect. When I started analyzing my home page, I’ve noticed that a lot of html validation errors existed. When I tried to analyze deeper an article, the amount of errors doubled and I really started to freak out thinking that my SEO would be greatly affected and I would not receive too many visitors from Google.
After analyzing what the errors consisted of, I have started to correct some of them, but regardless of how many I was fixing, others kept popping out. Then it crossed my mind that it would be a good idea to analyze some of the bigger sites that I was visiting to see how W3C Validation Affects their SEO. After doing an analysis on 3-4 sites I saw that all had problems with html errors but still they received a lot of visitors from Google and had a high PR. Then, just to be sure, I looked for the opinion of some respected SEO’s regarding the subject.
Respected SEO’s on W3C Validation:
1. Aaron Wall, of SEOBook:
If you want to get links from web designers who charge high rates then W3C validation is important to SEO, otherwise it has little direct importance outside of ensuring proper rendering to end users. When one visits Amazon.com or Google or Yahoo! (or just about any billion Dollar+ internet company) they will find a website that doesn’t validate. Why is that?
2. Brent Payne, SEO Director for Tribune
I like to keep errors under 25 or so, though Tribune has 100+ errors. Perfect code, I don’t think is necessary but you don’t want to have too malformed of HTML. Some say it is a ranking factor, I say you just don’t want to have stuff that is too unexpected for the bots.
3. Dennis Goedegebuure, Senior Manager & Head of SEO at eBay Inc.
It depends on the type of errors and how many, it all depends on whether the crawler can actually read the real content of the page.
4. Matt Cutts the official voice of Google
Here is a video with what Matt has to say regarding the problems:
With Respect to Effect of W3C Validation over SEO
As you can see from the above testimonials, validation has no direct impact over SEO and you will not receive any bonus from Google. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to fix some of the problems to make the site more appealing to the visitors and have a really speedy website.
Just try not to lose too many hour over this and just let it be.
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