Welcome to Hedir community. Hedir is a community helping to rank the sites on the basis of real customer feedback. Ranking is not based on automated checking of site properties but on the basis of experience with the site/business as a whole. Explore more about Hedir.
Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 6:58 am Post subject: Validation and its importance
Since rumblepup and I started a rather lively, yet intelligent debate on the subject of validation and its effects on SEO, I felt it would be an issue that probably stems off and should be in its own thread.
My stance is that validation and SEO do have a correlation, since a greater number of validation errors increases the likelihood that a page will not get indexed correctly. This doesn't necessarily mean that a page that has validation errors will not be indexed correctly, but that it is a possibility.
rumblepup has taken something of the opposite stance.
What say the peanut gallery? _________________ HEDir's Prince of Cool
for me validation is not improtant for seo. yes, you do need to clean up your code , but then most big sites (corporate ones) mostly, with high PR i see on the net fail to validate .
Now, I did this on one set of three word queries. Just to start a little test. I did some others
"miami corporate realestate"
"executive food services"
And guess what? You know, you just don't want to admit it.
It comes down to this. The Goog is not a source code validator. Neither is Yahoo, MSN, or Alexa.
They are in the business of RESULTS. Is the page CONTENT valid. How about IBL's? That's what makes good seo.
Don't get me wrong. I think valid html is a beautiful, wonderous thing, and I hope to someday be better at it. But business is business. If I have to get to work in the morning, I can either wait for 8 months for my Bentley Arnage to come in, or I can drive my Peice of S Toyota in on time.
OOOHHHH, and here is a real experiment by some guy who might know what he's doing.
SEO is not all about ranking. It is also about being listed at all and with the correct information.
If you have a bad copy and the code is malformed you have a good chance of being listed with an incorrect title or description. It is even possible to have no description at all.
If a person has not payed attention to their coding errors then one would assume they haven't invested blood, sweat and tears into their site.
I'm talking about sites that are on the extreme end of coding errors and ones that could potentially disturb their search engine listings, their viewable aspect in browsers, and the visitors that may never find them or never stay because of these attributes.
As far as ranking goes, high PR sites can do just about anything they like to whether against Google rules or not.
PetsMart is a high PR site. They also have a sister site called State Line Tack
A good example of what a high PR site gets to do on Google.
Sorry, I don't have the heart to make them clickable.
PetsMart
shop.petsmart.com www.petsmart.com
The sister site State Line Tack
shop.statelinetack.com www.statelinetack.com
When you have PR like they do then you get to have mirrors and interlinked sites.
So the example of Amazon must be stricken from the record as an example and any other site with high PR. The best guess has been that once a site reaches PR7 they cant be touched any longer and can rule the roost as they want to. I really have no idea what the real crossing point is for this PR non-touchable area.
Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 6:37 pm Post subject: Did you see the article?
Point taken. As I said, Valid HTML is a beautiful thing, and I think we all must endeavor to make our sites as error free as possible. However, I don't think we have to go nuts about it either.
The article I sited proves my point, and, well my brother, kind of disproves valid HTML. A website intentionally created with errors was crawled and indexed, and gained SERP. This was a brand spanking new webpage.
I never suggested that SEO was not about being listed incorrectly or correctly.
Quote:
It comes down to this. The Goog is not a source code validator. Neither is Yahoo, MSN, or Alexa.
They are in the business of RESULTS. Is the page CONTENT valid. How about IBL's? That's what makes good seo.
Of course, I should also ad That Title, Description, Alt tags, Anchor Text, are all as important, however, if the code you generate happens to have some errors, I do not think we have to go nuts about it. I think that we should optimize for these things mentioned FIRST, and work or VALID Code second.
Now, if we make the site title in a completely stoopid and INVALID way, then yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you that we just lost out on any SEO, or if our content text is within and invalidly created table or div, then yes, we just screwed the pooch. But I also think there are levels of acceptable errors.
The six million ALT tags that W3C hates? or the accidental extra space behind a </table> tag? It can create tables or div's all day with coding that has an extra space like <div> a thing < /div> (see the extra space?) and it will render and display and is crawlable just fine, but W3C hates it and won't validate these things, and the web page WORKS.
Ultimately, the web page must work. That's just the way it is. _________________ Ambivalent? Me?
Well, yes and no.
In more general terms, what do you think is the relationship between Google and the W3C? Do you think it would be important for Google to e.g. be concerned about valid HTML?
I like the W3C a lot; if they didn't exist, someone would have to invent them. People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for valid (or invalid) HTML. There are plenty of clean, perfectly validating sites, but also lots of good information on sloppy, hand-coded pages that don't validate. Google's home page doesn't validate and that's mostly by design to save precious bytes. Will the world end because Google doesn't put quotes around color attributes? No, and it makes the page load faster. Eric Brewer wrote a page while at Inktomi that claimed 40% of HTML pages had syntax errors. We can't throw out 40% of the web on the principle that sites should validate; we have to take the web as it is and try to make it useful to searchers, so Google's index parsing is pretty forgiving.
Well, what do you say? _________________ Ambivalent? Me?
Well, yes and no.
I like to equate correct HTML syntax with correct spelling and syntax:
Does correct spelling have some impact on a site?
Well depends on the site, a big bank will not like to have a "morgage calculator", and a public library does not write "public libary".
Similarily bad HTML syntax on Yahoo is a lot more a problem than on an upcoming blog.
Just pity that professionals use tools that produce bad syntax that goes through and through, just for good looks on the monitor or for some indexing program.
Yes, there are tricks to exploit the shortcomings of the indexing engines, after all someone reached position 1 for "adsense". Yes, if you are very good in the black art of SEO you may survive with bad syntax. How long? How long did G accept that someone else was on top for adsense?
LOL Not at all. I like that.
I see I might get some good quotes at Hedir.
I may start making a list of great "Hedir Quotes" for posting later
This one makes the list for sure. heh
I believe the AD doctype is "Totally Screwed Up i (where i is the square root of -1) Transitional", but I think you have to ask that question on the forums. _________________ HEDir's Prince of Cool
You make a beautiful webiste, with fantastic navigation and premier layout artwork. Your website supports a product that will help bald men grow hair, large women be thin, bread that slices itself, and zippers that work everysingle time. You've made this website with STRICT valid xhtml, from top to bottom. One of those websites that W3C just looooovvvvveeesss.
But no ever visits the site or buys the miracle product because your listed on page 3 of a SER and your competition, who has more than 150 code errors is in number 1 position.
Wouldn't that hmmmm, frustrate you a bit? _________________ Ambivalent? Me?
Well, yes and no.
Hehe Rumblepup, yes that would frustrate me big time! BUT, I don't think the 150 errors is the reason why my competition is ranked 1. You're not seriously suggesting that? If you are, that means that Google is validating HTML.
I don't think Google cares about valid HTML (yet?). They just parse the pages looking for content between the tags. If you really screw it up, it might affect your indexability and therefore your ranking. _________________ Please review some sites.
Contributing members of the month
Hehe Rumblepup, yes that would frustrate me big time! BUT, I don't think the 150 errors is the reason why my competition is ranked 1. You're not seriously suggesting that? If you are, that means that Google is validating HTML.
Awwww, boogers.
LOL.
No, I'm sorry if I sounded as if invalid html is get higher ranking than valid html. What I'm saying is the SEO is weird voodoo, and the Goog, MSN, and Yahoo works in ways that we can only guess.
What I'm saying is that for businesses that need to get content about their company on the web, whether they have a professional team of coders, designers or just office workers, the job has to get done.
Will it be better if everyone knew how to create valid html? Yes and no. If everyone knew how to create a website, then the designers amongst us would be out of a job, and if everyone knew how to create valid html, then this whole conversation would be a moot point, because ALL website would be valid html.
But the nature of the web is the same nature of this community. Everybody on board! Get in there and say something, share something, give us something to read, give us something cool to buy, tell me about your life, tell me about what's happening in the world, tell me about what is happening with the vegetable oil in a small rural school cafeteria, tell me about your band, tell me about your job, tell me about your company, tell me cool historical facts, tell me weirdo sex stories, tell me everything. Everybody is invited. And it's IMPOSSIBLE to get EVERYBODY to learn the same rules. You just can't.
Have you ever seen those really ugly websites? The kind will an orange background, and green letters? With little animated gif's all over the place? So have I. I love them. (Somebody has to love the ugly ones)
But I've come to understand that these ugly websites that wouldn't validate on any given Sunday, are given a fair chance in the SE's. Why, because the SE's have only one job to do, and that is to find websites that relate to what your searching for.
It's that simple. No more, no less.
And to ask everyone in the entire world that the only way for you to be invited to this big wide open community is to adhere to slightly elitist rules.
Yes, I said it. W3C standards are great things. A good rule of conduct. But it's elitist to tell someone that they can come to the party if ONLY if they drive a certain kind of car. A BMW no less. It's not in the spirit of the web.
And the SE's know that. The business of SE's is NOT code validation, but content and results. I think that some of the validation rules apply, inasmuch that the Goog checks to see if a webpage would even render in a browser, but that's about it. Now, SE placement is another matter, that depends on IBL's, content, and the weird voodoo I mentioned earlier, but the valid html RULE that everyone tautes is not in the spirit of the web, and IMHO, never will be. _________________ Ambivalent? Me?
Well, yes and no.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for valid (or invalid) HTML. There are plenty of clean, perfectly validating sites, but also lots of good information on sloppy, hand-coded pages that don't validate. Google's home page doesn't validate and that's mostly by design to save precious bytes. Will the world end because Google doesn't put quotes around color attributes? No, and it makes the page load faster. 
Search
Register
Login