CSS Destroyed My Rankings

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Just a side note here. I hope that it is clear here that some markup errors can hinder robots crawling a page though. Which errors I cannot tell, as I have no experience designing web pages with erroneous markup. :)

LOL I have. But for me 2 + 2 = 4 an not 5 and I would not advice any to say that 2 + 2 = 5.

CSS does not destroy your ranking if it is done correct. CSS is styling and should be separated from content. Period.

[Steven1976a]

SEOpro there is no link in your signature, any chance you could share it with us so that we can learn.

I dont think correct code is the essential point of SEO as i dont believe there is any single point to SEO. If there was, then spammers would abuse it but like all other factors im sure it pays a part and I agree that by not giving valid code it can only hinder the robots indexing files.

A couple of sites that you would expect to pay attention to valid code

www.amazon.com 1000+ errors
www.bbc.co.uk 30+ errors
www.cnn.com 40+ errors (Ranked 1 out of more than 2 billion for the word "News")

[Peter (IMC)]

Yes that is correct, Lasnik explains more about a robots ability to crawl in that interview.

[Jason Tor]

It looks like your SERP's have moved up a little since you posted this.

I would give Google a little more time. Any time you make a huge change to your site Google is going to get suspicious. Your rankings will come up. In the meanwhile you might want to consider anything new that you added to the site when you made the change. H1 tags? Did you use these on the old design? A lot of these little changes can add up and conflict with each other.

Jasontor

[bj]

Did you change the source order in the html? It's possible that may affect the importance the SEs put on certain pieces of your puzzle.

[bj]

A couple of sites that you would expect to pay attention to valid code

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more 1000+ errors
BBC - homepage - Home of the BBC on the Internet 30+ errors
CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment & Video News 40+ errors (Ranked 1 out of more than 2 billion for the word "News")

I venture to say that now that IE7 has been released you may eventually see some movement there. All sites of this size and complexity running off huge database backends were waiting for that event before upgrading code. And upgrading code on sites that large does NOT happen overnight.

Which is why I think it's majorly stupid of anyone to point to the big sites and use them as an excuse not to validate their little site. And there will someday come a day when quality of code does make some difference.

[datetopia]

Basically, the most popular websites are not fully W3C HTML compliant. They just use a common, simplified format.
You should stick mainly to writing the main tags correctly as they do and then focus on content and back links.