I would love to have someone prove to me where being W3C compliant helps you rank better in the search engines. I’ll pick three phrases off the top of my head.
1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Bicycle Parts
3. Homes for Sale
Affiliate Marketing – in Google, skipping wikipedia entries, the number 1 site was http://www.affiliatetips.com/ which has 39 Errors, 3 warning(s)
Bicycle Parts – the number 1 website was http://www.bikepartsusa.com/ which has 164 Errors, 45 warning(s)
Homes For Sale – number 1 site – http://www.realtor.com/ – 161 Errors, 14 warning(s)
I could check the top 10 and likely hit 10 out of 10 with errors like those. I’m not saying you should not strive for good code, but for anyone to tell you that it has something to do with SEO, ask for proof.
Code does have something to do with SEO if there is a lot more code than text in your page, (code to text ratio). Code does have something to do with SEO if it somehow slows down the load time of your website, somehow hides the text, or causes other problems that make users leave your website right away.
But as far as W3C compliant, show me proof that it matters.
[...] This post was Twitted by contentmanager [...]
I’ve had websites not rank well before because of errors in the code. But, on the other hand just validate any random top 10 websites in the SERPs and most if not all will not validate. New SEOs and web designers talk about W3C validation as a selling point for potential customers, but it’s a selling point not based in reality.