I think kgun touched on an important point. That is, whether or not an increase of ranking fo example, was due to the direct affect of performing a task or as an indirect result of what performing that task corrected or accomplished.

For instance, if validating the markup for a particular page corrected a broken link and thus resulted in higher rankings for that page, then the higher rankings would be due to correcting the link and not the validation itself.

Dave

__________________
Religious-Jewelry Blog - Deep Link Directory - Religious Jewelry