CSS Destroyed My Rankings

[janeth]

Originally Posted by Seopro

It is one big puzzle and everything fits in somewhere we just don't know the size of the pieces.

I think the title is suppose to be the biggest piece but there are a lot more of the link pieces than any other piece of the puzzle. Making them more important when added together.

[Seopro]

I don't know Janeth but can a PR2 with 15 links be ahead of a PR5 with 102 links in the seo areas on Google? Big difference is standards and validation.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by Seopro

I think all search engines are members of the W3C and I believe they will place a site written in standards above a site that is not with all things being equal. I have never failed to put a site in the top 10 that had valid code. That has just been my observation. On one key phrase affordable seo company oregon I have #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #10 even though there is hardly any competition. On affordable web design company (yahoo) I have been #1 for 14 months with valid code. And on google I have a #1 with a PR2 ahead of a PR6 because I have valid code and he does not. I have notice this several times with not just myself but with other designers that use web standards.
We all have our own ideas which is great and that is why I joined this forum. I will learn something from others if I take part in the discussions and hopefully I have some knowledge to pass on to others.

There's no competition what so ever, so it really has nothing to do with the code being validated. Try to validate the page he gave with tables, it also has HTML errors... If your logic was correct, he shouldn't have had high rankings with the old site either. So the problem is definitely not related to how valid the HTML code is.

Valid code is of no concern what so ever to a search engine. A website definitely does NOT gain points for having valid code. Neither does it lose points for having invalid code. However, valid code does make it a lot easier for a search engine to understand the content of the page and in that respect it does help.

But does valid code mean that you use h1 tags and p tags for example? AFAIK, it doesnt. Nor those the validation look at what was written in the title, metas and the actual content of the page. This is SEO related and not code related.

Pebbles,.... In case the URL's of your pages changed, did you use 301 redirects to the new URL's?

Did you change anchor texts in the links in your website? If you have, change the link texts back to what they were when you did have better rankings. That will probably do a lot of good.

In any way,.. just time will resolve this problem. A major site change like this doesn't happen without some ripples in the water,.. :)

[Seopro]

I don't think anyone knows the answer to this but we all have our own opinions which is great. I can say that I have been #1 on Yahoo out of 20 million for 15 months and everytime I check I am the only one that validated my code. The fact that I use CSS and my content is 60% compared to the others at 20% or less has an effect on this.
Also I dont think it makes a difference how much competition there is, it could be 300,000 in this case or 3 million or 30 million to have 6 places in the top 10 and those are the only sites that use valid code has to say something. I took the 6 places in the last 4 months when I added Portland, Oregon to my web site. Before that none of the top 10 validated.
We have all agreed to disagree which is what makes a forum so interesting and informative.

[Peter (IMC)]

Valid code is only part of the ranking process, other items will overrun that issue. If you have 47,900 IBL that www.espn.com has, then you can get by with screwing a few things up.

Here we're talking about small online shop, that doesn't have that kind of reputation yet.

Why is everyone so afraid of valid code and standards, why do people feel they are worthless to web site design?

Oh well, guess we should just tell everyone that shoddy work is okay, who cares if you get sued for not complying with US Section 508 accessibility laws?

Valid code is absolutely not part of the ranking process. It can't be because it is completely unrelated to the actual content. There is of course an indirect relation between valid code and rankings.

I don't think people feel like valid code is worthless to webdesign. But you have to keep in mind that making sure all your code is valid is a lot of work with (from a business point of view) very little to no benefit. That´s just the way it is.

It is one big puzzle and everything fits in somewhere we just don't know the size of the pieces.

Those pieces aren't so unknown and their sizes are also not unknown. They´re pretty easy to figure out actually because search engines have just one obvious goal,.. to put the best pages at the top. And it is just common sense that a title has a lot of information about what a page is about. The same logic applies to other "pieces".

can a PR2 with 15 links be ahead of a PR5 with 102 links in the seo areas on Google? Big difference is standards and validation.

That simply depends on the keyword phrase that was used to search with... :) so the answer is yes, that is possible. At the same time, validation has little to do with it.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by Seopro

I don't think anyone knows the answer to this but we all have our own opinions which is great. I can say that I have been #1 on Yahoo out of 20 million for 15 months and everytime I check I am the only one that validated my code. The fact that I use CSS and my content is 60% compared to the others at 20% or less has an effect on this.
Also I dont think it makes a difference how much competition there is, it could be 300,000 in this case or 3 million or 30 million to have 6 places in the top 10 and those are the only sites that use valid code has to say something. I took the 6 places in the last 4 months when I added Portland, Oregon to my web site. Before that none of the top 10 validated.
We have all agreed to disagree which is what makes a forum so interesting and informative.

That huge number of results is caused by individual words. If you want to know your real competition, search with quotes. For your phrase "affordable seo company oregon" there are 9 results, including some of your own posts in various forums ;) There's no competition for that phrase.

Also, you said you gained rankings by adding "portland, oregon" to your site. That alone is already prove that your valid codes didn't put you at the top. The content did!!!

Your conclusion that you rank #1 because of valid code is wrong. Test it by adding a couple of errors to your code and see if your rankings change,. :)

Agreeing to disagree is nice, but it is also being plain old stubborn and you´re definitely not learning anything from sticking to your own opinions without even the consideration there might be more to it than just valid codes,. :)

The error often made is the logic that:

"I did A and B happened, therefore A is responsible for B happening and this always applies in every situation."

If you live by that rule you´re going to lose a lot of time on a lot of stuff... :)

[Seopro]

With the ever changing algos I dont thing anyone knows for sure the size of the pieces but we can all take a wild guess and each one of us will guess different.
For 3 years I could not put a web site in the top 100 and after I learned CSS the last 4 years I have put every site I optimize in the top 10. Valid code is just as easy to write as invalid code and it is just my preference to valadite every page through the w3c. It seems to work for me so I am happy.
Don
Seopro

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by Seopro

With the ever changing algos I dont thing anyone knows for sure the size of the pieces but we can all take a wild guess and each one of us will guess different.
For 3 years I could not put a web site in the top 100 and after I learned CSS the last 4 years I have put every site I optimize in the top 10. Valid code is just as easy to write as invalid code and it is just my preference to valadite every page through the w3c. It seems to work for me so I am happy.
Don
Seopro

You learned CSS, which resulted in clean code,.. :)

And don't get me wrong, I appreciate webmasters that makes a point out of validating code. For me however, going as far that the code 100% validates is commercially simply not a smart thing to do. It takes too much time to prevent every little error that can happen.

But be careful with the asumption that valid code gives a website some kind of real advantage over sites that do not have valid code.

[Seopro]

There are more than 9 companies in Portland that use the same keywords. I can name at least 30 that I know personally.
The words "portland oregon" just targeted local at the same time I was #1 on yahoo for almost a year out of 20 million. Those two words have a minimal effect on content. And I don't worry about how much time it takes because it is not that much more time to create valid code. I bid by the job and my customers pay me well for the results I produce for them.
Also I am a disabled vet, all I have is time so I dont see any reason not to do things according to the W3C.
Being stubborn is a trade mark of mine. I tell my customers it will be done right or I will not do it and web standards are there for a reason. I have more customers than I can handle. I work with the PGA Tour and Turner Enterprises as a consultant plus I work with PGA star Phil Mickelson as his web designer. I guess that is doing pretty good.
Don
Seopro

[Seopro]

I have sat back many times and thought about what if I am wrong. But what if I am right? You have not even considered that and I have been almost every day for the last 4 years.
Don
Seopro

[k001]

I think youll regain your rankings.

[Clint1]

I've heard others say similar things about them going to CSS then getting their sites penalized. This is why I never have changed to CSS. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's pretty stupid though that an SE would penalize for it, but we all know they do stupid things.

Can anyone please tell me if there would be any negative affects of me just going to a CSS nav menu on my pages?
Thanks.

[danners02]

Validate your code:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...pebblez.com%2F

I did not find any H1, H2, H3 tags on the homepage?
Get an H1 tag in early on in the source code with your keyphrase(s) in.

Get rid of the comments, eg:


Clean up any errant spaces in code, eg:
[b] Decorative Wall Clocks Made

Get rid of underlines in spans:
<span class="navbig1">____________________</span>
use CSS to put a border in instead

try to use CSS for spacing, not a series of
tags

Major code improvements/amendments do sometimes have a short term negative effect on SERPS but implement the above advive and it should perform better than previous site

[brucet]

Our web site throws up all kinds of W3C errors, and the code is a honestly a bit of a mess. But that hasn't stopped us holding top positions on Google for some pretty competitive keywords over a sustained period. We have been planning to clean it up, as it does seem to affect our rankings in Yahoo and MSN. But after reading this thread I am having second thoughts - our Google rankings are too precious to take risks with.

There may well be 'invalid' code that makes a difference to search engines, but there is clearly also invalid code that doesn't. I have posted on this subject here before, and got some quite confusing responses which had very little in common with each other! I did some research elsewhere as well, but I have never been able to find any real consensus about which aspects of code validation are important from an SEO POV, and which are not.

[hasit]

You said it right. You are trying to create a new website (Which Google is going to screen it throughly ), then you are trying to hide some text.

I would HIGHLY recommend you should submit the sitemaps again and place a reinclusion request.

btw: is your website found by site:www.domainname.com?

Originally Posted by pebblez

IBL's? I gain about 100 a month these days according to yahoo. As far as my sites linking structure I didn't really change it, although I did make a standard nav bar for every section of my site, which has made things a little more uniform.

As far as a sitemap I have a google site map (am looking for a decent ROR sitemap generator) I also link to my homepage from every page.

I do have a theory and if someone could take a look at this I would really appreciate it. In my header I have an H1 tag around the first text on the page, and its just about the first thing that shows up in the code. At the top of the header div I have a black picture background and at the bottom I have set the background to just be white. The text in the H1 is black and would show up against that black background, but I have added margins to the H1 to move it down.

Could the search engines inability to read the css margins on my H1 cause them to think I'm hiding black text against a black picture in an H1 tag right at the top of my page? Can google even tell the picture is black?

I would really appreciate any feedback on this.

[lala]

danners02:
"Get rid of the comments, eg:
"

But how would you do this if you use Dreamweaver's templates?

lala

[dux]

I was wondering what had happened to pebblez as there has been no input recently, but it looks like he/she has been busy cleaning the code up! Hope it works for you....!

As a side issue to this, how do people feel about restyling a h1 tag using css so that it blends easily into the page content? By this I mean changing the standard h1 font size to say, 12px or something similar? Is this black, grey or white hat seo?

[SemAdvance]

weslinda

Since most cart pages are behind https:// most search engines cannot willnot crawl those pages so this content will not add or detract from search positioning.

Why you would not want to always match titles to h1 tags???? Search engines are data mining robots that store information and can detect patterns and in detecting a pattern it can determine things that it may or may not like about your pattern....

patterns can hurt you for example if you use a pattern of link building from link farms, or use the exact same words in your title. meta description, meta keywords.....it then becomes apparent you are trying to gain search engine positioning and are not doing the best work for the people who visit your site.

acttiveco

Yes you are right major changes could have an effect...I should have been more clear in my post.

seopro

I dont think PR has anything to do with how google places sites on a page but that is my opinion.

This is fact. I have a PR1 site ranked continually month to month at #1 on Google for a moderately competitive keyword term and nobody can move it from it's position, and the 9 other sites all have PR3 and higher.

Getting to the front pages of Google is like solving a puzzle or cooking a great chili. There are many ingredients needed... or most of the puzzle pieces put together... to give the search engines a clear picture or a taste of the some really great chili.

Lastly...if you are counting kw% percentages on pages you are really wasting your time....the scoring factor for this is of very little import. You are much better off writing for people than machines.. LSI eliminates most of the density and weighting scoring in body content.

Dux

Using the h1 tag and applying styling to it to make it look good is fine....Google says build websites for users not build ugly websites for users.

The problem arises when a webmaster uses 10 h1 tags on one page with the same keyword term, that search engines would likely have a problem.

Alot of it comes down to intent at times...

[SemAdvance]

Originally Posted by lala

danners02:
"Get rid of the comments, eg:
"

But how would you do this if you use Dreamweaver's templates?

lala

No need to.

What could be referenced here is when people stuff comments with keyword terms which you are not doing.

Google and other engines know Dreamweaver templates use commenting quite heavily and has no problems with this.

The employees at Google are CS engineers and know a great deal of what they are doing. It would not be much of a company if it could not ascertain what is normal operating procedures for other software companies.

[weslinda]

Only two comments. First, it's not more difficult to create a valid site, in my opinion it's quite easy if you start correctly. Do you work right, don't keep f'ing around.

Matt Cutts recently did a video based on what makes a good site. #1 issue is that your site is browseable by a text browser, all the way through your site.

Valid code, with clean layout and proper navigation makes this happen very nicely. The better a site can be navigated, the better it will do.

Everyone here is discussing how valid code can't affect search engine results, and for that, I have to disagree. I recently took over the design of a major medical web site. 100k unique visitors each month. The site had begun plummeting in the rankings over the last 6-12 months. I have begun working on the site, adding only the basic content that was already being added which was 2-3 news articles each month and nothing else.

I have begun validating the code, and replacing image based link menus with text based CSS UL menus. Within 30 days, we've seen a jump of almost 100% in the number of referrals coming from Google to our site. And that numbers grows each and every day.

None of us know everything that makes a site rank in the search engines. Anyone that tells you they do, run.

I'm not saying that the valid code is an important factor just cause I like to spout the cause of doing things the right way. I discuss this as part of the focus of a site because it is the right way to do things and I've seen it positively affect a web sites ranking in Google and other search engines. The most noticeable change was Google.

[pebblez]

First of all, I can't believe all of the helpful advice I have recieved from so many well respected and brilliant individuals in our industry. Its feirce discussion such as this that make this the best forum around for SEO and SEM

There are a few things specific to my website which may have bearing on this discussion. First, when my homepage wasn't validating it was doing so for a few specific reasons. The major problems arose from a Google search box at the very bottom of the page, and an email form which I took directly from my yahoo hosting provider.

The other problems were caused by a bit of code which my webhost yahoo inserts at the bottom of my homepage. I have completely cleaned up my homepage code and validated it, and I still get 6 errors because of this snippet which is added by Yahoo on the server. Is it possible this bit of code is used to give a boost in yahoo for sites which host with them? Do you think google would use this code to penalize yahoo hosted sites? Probably not but who knows...

Either way its time to consider a new host.

The rest of the errors were the stupid duplicate div id's. I'm new to CSS. I will learn.

The fact that most of the errors were at the very bottom of the page and were caused by things which existed in my old site, didn't hurt it, and were provided by the SE's I am reluctant to declare my sloppy code as the cause of the problem.

And, I will be honest, I have always been one of those who didn't think valid code helped in rankings.

However....despite this I respect all of those who have said it helps so much that I can't risk it with this site, and as I said I quickly validated my homepage as much as I could, and cleaned up the other pages as well. I am using dreamweaver templates on this site, so it has been a little bit quicker than otherwise.

I will keep this post updated with the results of my valid coding. Unfortunately I wont be a good scientific model as I am also tweaking other things on page including my headings, in order to fix this.

I would say that the question could be answered pretty easily by putting up a number of websites all going after the same set of keywords, all with the same amount of content, and with the only variable being whether the code was validated and how badly it wasn't. Even if its a low competition keyword, or if all of the sites remain back in the 500's of google, you can still compare them relative to one another. You might even be able to do it with one site and multiple subdomains.

I cant tell you all how much I appreciate your expert help, and I will keep this updated with the results of my validation efforts.

[Seopro]

I agree with linda that it is easier to write valid code than non-valid code by starting right. Common sense tells me that since the search engines belong to the W3C they would give just a little more weight to web standards. My content to code ratio is higher and everyone knows it is about content not how much code you put in. Pure css gives me more control over the look and feel of a site. And bottom line, traffic has increased.
Lot of good information on both sides of the fence.
Don
Seopro

[Peter (IMC)]

I would HIGHLY recommend you should submit the sitemaps again and place a reinclusion request.

Reinclusion is for sites that have been banned completely (ie. completely removed from the index.) That´s not the case here so a reinclusion request is absolutely not necessary and won't have any effect.

[Peter (IMC)]

Everyone here is discussing how valid code can't affect search engine results, and for that, I have to disagree. I recently took over the design of a major medical web site. 100k unique visitors each month. The site had begun plummeting in the rankings over the last 6-12 months. I have begun working on the site, adding only the basic content that was already being added which was 2-3 news articles each month and nothing else.

I have begun validating the code, and replacing image based link menus with text based CSS UL menus. Within 30 days, we've seen a jump of almost 100% in the number of referrals coming from Google to our site. And that numbers grows each and every day.

Why do you assume it was the validation of the code? You´re talking about basic SEO techniques that have nothing to do with valid codes. You say you did the following:

* adding new content
* change imaged based links to text based links

THAT is why you gained positions in Google. Not because your codes are validated... :)

You say you did A, B and C,.. and your conclusion is that just C was responsible for your higher rankings.

You probably think I am doing the same thing by saying that A and B are responsible for higher rankings and that C had nothing to do with it. And you´re right! :) If a search engine uses valid codes as a ranking factor, it would result in many popular sites to drop in the results without any real reason for it.

What should the search engines do? Be like: "Oh this site has 10 errors and that site has 100 errors, therefor the site with 10 errors is better." That doesn't make any sense what so ever.

[Tolis]

Hi all

I am running the site easytraveller.gr and after your suggestion i try to convert from flash into css. many of my pages including the main ones are converted. The old designed site had a page rank in Google 5. The same happened with the new designed for the first time. after 2 or 3 weeks the page rank dropped to 0 and for 2 weeks the site disappeared from the search results even with the keyword being the domain name. Now the results seem to come back but the page rank is still 0. My other domain easytraveller.net that maps to the above one has the same page rank 2 as it was before. Hope for better days unless someone has a good idea.

[Peter (IMC)]

Common sense tells me that since the search engines belong to the W3C they would give just a little more weight to web standards.

validator.w3.org -->> www.google.com Result: Failed validation, 66 errors

validator.w3.org -->> =www.yahoo.comResult: Failed validation, 37 errors

validator.w3.org --> search.msn.comResult: Failed validation, 60 errors

Not in their own sites.. :)

[weslinda]

Peter, we didn't add new content. We continued the 2-3 articles a month that has been done ever since the site was begun in 1998.

Are you sharing that the only reason for our uptick could be attributed to text menus? Valid code has nothing to do with it? Come on, lets get real, I think you and I should agree to disagree.

You seem to be a staunch advocate of not validating code. Why is that? I believe a web site should be built to be functional to all, and that will have an affect on search engines. Why is that such a unbelievable concept?

If accessiblity and valid site code unimportant, why is google developing their accessible search? http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Yes, Google will rank pages with invalid code in the first position? Any idea why? Less than 1% of all web sites actually have valid code. They have to. If they only picked from sites that have valid code, then there would be problems, they couldn't show off many pages now could they?

Pebblez: I'm glad you got your answers and I think the more you work on the site, the better you'll do in your search results. There are lots of ways to get to the top of the search engine, and in my opinion, doing things the right way, will get you noticed by the search engines and make your visits by customers more enjoyable.

In the end, it is about the visitor, and not the search engine.

[Peter (IMC)]

Are you sharing that the only reason for our uptick could be attributed to text menus? Valid code has nothing to do with it? Come on, lets get real, I think you and I should agree to disagree.

Maybe its that I look at it from a algorithm point of view. How valid code is, can not be a factor in the rankings because of what you explained about less than 1 % of the sites having valid code.

However, if you do turn the code in a website into Valid code, then the result will be the search engines can understand the content better. But that again is not because of how valid the code is. It is a side effect of using valid codes.

You seem to be a staunch advocate of not validating code. Why is that? I believe a web site should be built to be functional to all, and that will have an affect on search engines. Why is that such a unbelievable concept?

There´s nothing wrong with using valid code. And I am not against validating code. The suggestion was that all you have to do is validate your code and the search engines will reward you for it with lots of high rankings. I believe that at least 1 person should mention that this is not correct... :)

But I will leave it at this. I'm not writing here to convince you and others of what the real importance is of valid code (as far as high rankings are concerned of course) but just to give all the readers the idea to look further than just a validator at w3.org

[weslinda]

There hasn't been anyone that has ever shared that only valid code can get you to the top of the rankings. I didn't say it, no one here has said it.

We've only said it is a part of the equation. Do you know the entire algorithm Google uses to rank a site? Do you have every piece they use to rank a web site?

[Peter (IMC)]

for some reason this was duplicated. So I deleted this post, you can read the content in the other post.

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

Are you sure? This was what I replied to originally:

You can argue about what that says, but to me it says that the problem of dropped rankings is because of validation errors. I don't agree with that and I never will... :)

(added: By the way, I have nothing against Seopro. He´s a member in this forum just like all of us are. He just was the one that made the statement. What ever I say in the forum is never against anybody. I´m just sharing my experiences and knowledge of SEO.)

Do you need to know in exact detail how an engine works in order to drive a car? No you don't. But the best drivers in the world, do know how an engine works. They need that knowledge in order to do a better job at driving the car. However, they do not know the car in detail like the top engineers that developed the car.

Now keep in mind that the pilots of the car are much better drivers than the engineers who developed it.

Understanding what gets a website high rankings is not a matter of knowing the details of the algorithms, it does how ever require the knowledge of how a search engine works. The question of wether or not Google uses coding errors them selves to determine positions can be answered by using simple common sense.

Suppose you have 4 webpages about the same subject. One has 68 code errors, the second has 29 code errors and the last only 4 and the last one has no coding errors what so ever. Now I ask you: "What does the number of code errors tell you about the relevance of the pages? The answer is: Nothing!

So why would they spend valuable processing power on a factor that tells absolutely nothing about relevance?

[Seopro]

What I was refering to was the improper use of the div id in the css code. If he validated his code he would find out exactly where those problems were and could fix them. The big question is if the search engines will skip over code they do not understand? Does improper use of CSS have the same effect as the use of JavaScript? Only the search engines know that answer for sure and they are not talking.
Don
Seopro

[pathikbd]

Dear Pebblez,

I've not used CSS before, but I guess I know what happened. I looked at your CSS file and found something that is making you rank low.

Google recognizes your important keywords between some special tags, like:

Bold Tags:
Strong Tags:
Heading Tags: <h1></h1> or <h2></h2>
Font Weight Tags: <font size="#"></font>

Astonishingly, I saw some [b] tags in your source HTML, but no [b] or Bold Tags. You don't have a single <h#> or Header Tag either. Your Font Size tag does not show more than "-1" value.

Google therefore weighs your unimportant keywords and important keywords in same scale. But, don't blame it on CSS. It's a good thing to make your site rich & dense with your important keywords. i.e. Achieving high keyword density page is not possible without CSS. Because, you can eliminate a lot of messy HTML codes in your pages and most of it will be enriched with keywords.

My suggestion would be to eliminate the following lines in your CSS file:

[font-weight: bold;] in line # 51, 61, 73, 129, 187, 190, 317, 322, 340, 347, 370, 377, 603, 607 (Just give a "Find" and "Replace All" command with nothing)

I hope you got the idea. Similarly, delete these lines in your CSS file:

[font-size: ]
[h1] / [h2] / [h3]

Finally, reformat the whole site using these tags manually and give Google some candies to lick on:

Bold Tags:
Strong Tags:
Heading Tags: <h1></h1> or <h2></h2>
Font Weight Tags: <font size="#"></font>

I think it should work out and I believe that it can give you better result than your past performance from Google. Most of all Yahoo and MSN also will like you.

[noel_x99]

I'm one of those people that don't believe that valid code affects rankings much.

I have lots of older sites out there that don't validate. Some that use tables and really bad formatting...some CSS with cleaner code - Yet a number of these rank well and convert well - even for some competitive terms.

SEs are looking to provide the answers that their "customers" are searching for. All things being equal, maybe they do rank valid code, or pages with a better code/content ratio higher. But how often are "all things equal"? One site may have a better page title or better content or better use of the keywords that people are actually typing in. It seems to me that these pages rank better than pages that have valid code.

A search engine "customer" doesn't care if the code is valid or not. They care if they find the answer they are looking for. It seems to me that's what the SEs care about too.

[Peter (IMC)]

Does improper use of CSS have the same effect as the use of JavaScript? Only the search engines know that answer for sure and they are not talking.

Again, a little bit of common sense will provide you with the answer. We know what the effect of javascript is, right? What ever is inside javascript is invisible to search engines.

If "improper use of CSS" would in fact have the same effect as javascript then 99% of the internet would be invisible to the search engines,.. :) So obviously, it doesn't have the same effect.

Bad codes reduce the ability of the search engine to destract the content from the pages. But in principle you can assume that if your browser is able to show you a website, Google is able to destract the hypertext content from it.

Ofcourse, the proper use of h tags and p tags and alt atributes, and titles and etc... will give you the SEO benefits, but if you don't use them, your code can still validate, can't it?

[pebblez]

interesting thing about the H1 tags...

I had them originally. one on each page indicating what the page was about.

However for several reasons based on searches I did trying to get inside the SE's heads, i thought the H1's might be hurting me so I removed them.

As soon as I did I saw some of my more important rankings returning. Not all of them, and it could be a coincidence, but who knows

I put them back...and a day later I was gone. So...I took them down again, and for now they are coming back a little.

It may be that me suddenly adding h1 to 700 different pages all at once caused google to think i was h1 stuffing or something, and that combined with all the other changes flagged me as a spammer

whatever it is, everything I do seams to be working opposite to how it is supposed to these days. Im ready to go back to link building already

[justicewhite]

Originally Posted by pebblez

interesting thing about the H1 tags...

I had them originally. one on each page indicating what the page was about.

However for several reasons based on searches I did trying to get inside the SE's heads, i thought the H1's might be hurting me so I removed them.

As soon as I did I saw some of my more important rankings returning. Not all of them, and it could be a coincidence, but who knows

I put them back...and a day later I was gone. So...I took them down again, and for now they are coming back a little.

It may be that me suddenly adding h1 to 700 different pages all at once caused google to think i was h1 stuffing or something, and that combined with all the other changes flagged me as a spammer

whatever it is, everything I do seams to be working opposite to how it is supposed to these days. Im ready to go back to link building already

Hmmm.... I haven't heard anything like this before. Perhaps do these changes in a controlled manner and let us know how it goes. Maybe you've discovered something here.

Anyhow, good luck with your site.

[Seopro]

Peter,
I was talking about major mistakes not minor ones like forgetting to close a paragraph. Frames are invisable and so is JavaScript, if you tell the browser that the text is written in hebrew which is right to left will the browser read it and will the search engines index it. Search engines can not index flash and a few other programs. Anyway we agree to disagree and that is very informitive to others.
Don
Seopro

[weslinda]

Peter, I think we're missing each others boat. But I hope to rectify my thoughts here, and my thoughts only.

1. I've never said that Valide code is the only reason a site does poorly, or well in SERPS. I will never state that, and I will never agree with anyone that does.

2. I will and have said that I believe that using valid, and well laid out code, can improve your rankings. Be that through the engines being able to extract the information on your pages more effectively, or if the code to content ratio is lower, because I've effectively used only the amount of code I need to display the page.

3. Great search engine rankings have to do with so many things, it cannot be said that one thing will lead to great results. If you have a crappy site, with no content, with no one linking in, but you have valid code, that alone won't get you to the top. On the other hand, if you have a site, with great content, but don't use valid code, and clean content layout, I think you will do more poorly than someone who takes the exact same site and cleans it up. I've seen this happen time and time again.

In the end, web design should be done with the visitor in mind. Ensuring all visitors can access all information is what everyone should be striving for. Until designers do that, the search engines will have to rank poorly done work because they have nothing else to work with.

In this particular case, I think there are numerous issues that are out there that affected this site, and I surely don't think it has to do with the flip to CSS. I think the other side of this coin is that we have to look at long term results. I've seen sites do an initial slide only to come back in a few weeks to a higher spot than when they started.

[Seopro]

Hats off to weslinda that is exactly what I have been saying. The bulk of my business is taking sites out of tables and into css and optimizing it. Needless to say I am very successful with what I do and I will always use valid code no matter what.
I have a feeling if you read books by Eric Meyer or Jeffery Zeldman on CSS and Web standards you might have a reason to think about what we are saying. I know the search engines will drift more toward valid code than away from it.
Don
Seopro

[greeneagle]

Let's make it real simple here, we seem to be drifting off.

Stepping back to an earlier post, I find it really hard to believe that the GOOG or any of the main SEs would inflict any kind of SERP or Ranking penalty for moving to an all CSS Site from tables or a combination thereof, as long as:

1. Site structure (URLs) are maintained in the transition.
2. Each indexed page doesn't represent significant relevant topical and/or content changes.

There has never been and most probably never will be substantiable evidence to conjecture or propogate rumors otherwise.

There is absolutely no penalty for extreme content to code ratio changes under the simple conditions met above.

Surely we don't really expect extreme logical "disjoints" in maturing "logical machines", do we?

Ken

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Seopro

Valid code is just as easy to write as invalid code and it is just my preference to valadite every page through the w3c.

Fully agree. The top of laziness is doing everything correct from scratch. Also note:

• Some HTML markup is being deprecated.
• A few here mentioned du (n) plicating the same ID. How does the Se BOT see that lack of uniqueness? That is a type of markup we call "spagetthi coding" and should be avoided by all means. The big difference between a CSS class and CSS ID is that an ID should be unique.
• An open tag in an XML document is a serious error. The DOM tree is incomplete. If you are manipulating DOM nodes, how can you find the correct node (element) if there are open tags? A DOM tree is a simple datastructure. You can look at HTML as a dialect of XML, a subset for those with a little mathematical background.
• I can not understand why designers / coders in march 2007 can be so sloppy on incorrect markup and code.
• Last argument. How easy is it to update and change a site with a site-wide linked or imported stylsheet and JS in external include files? How difficult can it be to update a site with lot of pages with open HTML tags? Time is money, money / time that can be used on SEO and PPC.

[kgun]

Just noted this related WPW thread posted March 07:
Designing Search Engine Friendly Websites

Note the opening sentence:
"SEO on a website should begin during the design, redesign or template stage not as an afterthought once the site has been launched".

[Peter (IMC)]

whatever it is, everything I do seams to be working opposite to how it is supposed to these days. Im ready to go back to link building already

This can be explained by the historical data algorithms. When you do something drastic to your pages it can happen that certain ranking factors are set to an age of 0 (zero). This causes your average age to go down which results in a drop in rankings. what you´re describing is very normal. You add an H1 tag and your rankings drop, you take it out and the rankings come back. That seems to be contradicting the logic that the h1 tag is about the second most important tag (after the title). But all you have to do is give it some time and your rankings will come back stronger than they were before. It just requires that painful thingy,.. patience.. :)

[Peter (IMC)]

Weslinda,

I liked your resume. Good post!

Peter

[weslinda]

My resume Peter? Please do tell...I think I missed something.

[msaqibansari]

Originally Posted by pebblez

I had used a table based design for years, and I had good rankings on all of my keywords. Recently i changed over to a pure css design including the use of h1 tags, divs instead of cells, the whole works.

When the site was finished I uploaded it to the web and waited. A week later my rankings started dropping. First they dropped in google. Then they started dropping in yahoo. Msn has been fine, but who cares.

Can anyone tell me what I've done wrong?
The new site can be seen at http://pebblez.com
One page of the old site can be seen at http://pebblez.com/index2.html

I really appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks

Same problem with my site.
www.superdiscountshop.com

[greeneagle]

msaqibansari,

Welcome to WPW.

Same problem with my site.
www.superdiscountshop.com

Your site has about 500 different topics on the home page. The great machines in the prairie (SEs) don't know which "silos" to deposit or retrieve your information to and from.

Those "logical disjunctures" are much more excusable at "Trusted Site" levels.

That is a different issue.

If you want to open up another thread and get some help, you may want to try the "Site Review" forum.

Ken

[Peter (IMC)]

Originally Posted by weslinda

My resume Peter? Please do tell...I think I missed something.

resumé as in abridgement, abstract, summery

Not the list of previous jobs and schools and universities you attended... :)

Since english still isn't my native language, I guess I pick the wrong words sometimes.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Peter (IMC)

resumé as in abridgement, abstract, summery

Not the list of previous jobs and schools and universities you attended... :)

Since english still isn't my native language, I guess I pick the wrong words sometimes.

Where do you have your IT education from?

When is the next time you come here and tell us how to cook spegetthi?