Can good code (markup) improve your rankings?

[Webnauts]

I picked up some parts of this page http://www.seomoz.org/articles/searc...-factors.php#2 and I would like to hear what you think:

Can valid code improve your rankings?

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Invalid Code
The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots, or which creates infinite loops or other hazards could affect rankings directly, or by causing lost indexing of pages by search engines.

Bad markup => poor content semantics/structure.

Ammon Johns
Depends on the extent of the problem. Sending a spider into a loop would not be good and would likely prevent indexing of that page and others.
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W3C Validation

The W3C organization of web standards issues requirements for validation. These standards are used by many websites to construct "proper" markup in the HTML document type of their choice. Whether search engines measure proper validation is up for debate, but could be considered a ranking factor.

Bill Slawski
Validation by itself is unlikely to be a ranking factor, however, a valid, error free page following standards may rank better than one that isn't because a defined DTD and charset may reduce the possibility of errors in interpreting a page.

Dan Thies
Does any search engine's home page validate yet?

Danny Sullivan
i wish you had a zero, because that's what I'd be voting here.

DazzlinDonna
Only useful in making sure spiders can index the page. May have some merit with MSN.

EGOL
Has anybody tested this to see. Sounds like something very easy to test and settle all questions.

Todd Malicoat
Would be pretty hard to do from an SE standpoint, but would logically be a factor.

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If reading the above you come to the conclusion that valid code can improve your rankings, why endless of SEOs don't care about good markup?

Before someone will say here that not every error can hurt, I would like to hear first, which errors DO hurt.

The whole idea is, that I just thought of trying to setup a list of errors that can hurt crawlability and rankings, for the people who do not want or care to have their code validated against the W3C guidelines.

Thanks. :)

[nelsonez]

The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots, or which creates infinite loops or other hazards could affect rankings directly, or by causing lost indexing of pages by search engines.

I would change this quote from "could" to WILL. If the code is so bad that the Google spider can't make it through the entire page then of course the bad code will hurt the site's ranking.

However, a site does NOT need to be W3C valid to be fully indexed by search engine spiders. And I bet anyone on the webpro forum to prove me wrong on this.

The following code may not be semantically proper but it is both W3C valid and it will NOT affect a search engine spider.





</p>

Semantically proper code, W3C valid code, and spider friendly code are not mutually exclusive.

Eric

[Webnauts]

The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots, or which creates infinite loops or other hazards could affect rankings directly, or by causing lost indexing of pages by search engines.

I would change this quote from "could" to WILL. If the code is so bad that the Google spider can't make it through the entire page then of course the bad code will hurt the site's ranking.

Thanks Eric for the feedback. And by the way those quotes are not mine. They are from the site I mentioned above.

I know that HTML validation is not necessary for SEO, but I am asking here, how can someone tell which errors can really hurt crawlability and rankings.

[nelsonez]

Hi Webnauts,

No worries. I realized you were just throwing different quotes out there. It is an interesting topic that you bring up. Not that we could actually do this experiement but it would be interesting to find out if which of two essentially identical sites, one that was completely W3C compliant and the other was not, would rank higher.

I don't doubt that the W3C compliant site would rank first but I just don't know how much this one criteria out of the dozens that make up the SE algorithms would really matter.

Eric

[Webnauts]

Eric do you know Google's Accessible Search? http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articl...le-search.html
Do you know that accessibility requires valid HTML? And did you know that accessibility for the blind requires alt attributes?

I am aware that they are still working on this project, but here is a real issue I would like to mention:

With the Google Search I am ranking today for the keyphrase "seo article" 32 and with Google's Accessible Search I am ranking for this keyphrase "27".

Isn't that strange?

So whats next?

[Webnauts]

I guess it would be a great idae to watch this video of Matt Cutts (Google Engineer): http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...0&q=Matt+Cutts

[thegypsy]

Uhhh it's pretty standard stuff that compliance won't help rankings in any of the major engines. Even YaH prattled on about it at PubCon... so IMHO it is a no go..

The use of code which may not be readable or spiderable to search engine bots, or which creates infinite loops or other hazards could affect rankings directly, or by causing lost indexing of pages by search engines.

Sure, if a page won't render.. but that's an extreme case

As for the ranking anomalies.. well they have different algos silly.. of course it is different.

[incrediblehelp]

Well said "thegypsy"

[Webnauts]

So it seems like those guys do not know what they are talking about. Right? Hm, and I thought they are SEO experts!

[thegypsy]

Hiya Incredible - How ya been?

Webnauts - Certainly some great minds, that's just an older document. Certainly written before Matt came out with the Code v SEO stuff...

Just another case of needing to keep one's SEO fresh.. and I like to DATE things I write so people know how seriously to take it