Should we get our W3 Validation Errors Fixed for SEO. How important is it ?
-
Hi All,
We implement most things on our Website that is recommended and most recently we did Schema.org. However, one area which we haven't done is fix our W3 Validation Errors.
My developer thinks they are not so as such and it's more about ticking the boxes but does anymore have any experience whereby fixing all these did actually have an SEO /Ranking Benefit ?..
Most of our URL'S are indexed and google recrawls regularly so I am not sure as to it's importance.
Also we have a mobile responsive version so I wasn't sure if it more important because of this.
From what I read, I can't see to any benefit from fixing it all but just wanted some other opinions?
thanks
Pete
-
Many thanks LindaLV
Pete
-
Matt Cutts has said a number of times that invalid HTML in and of itself does not cause a penalty. Here's one example: http://youtu.be/j3KgrbiB1pc
"So Google does not penalize you if you have invalid HTML because there would be a huge number of webpages like that and some people know the rules and then decided to make things a little bit faster or to tweak things here there and so their pages don't validate and there are enough pages they don't validate that we said OK this would actually hurt search quality if we said only the pages that validate are allowed to rank or rank those a little bit higher."
Yes, you should write good HTML. But, unless it is so bad that it causes a bad user experience, simply having some W3C errors is not going to be a problem for SEO. (At least for now...)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How important is admin-ajax.php?
Hi there! It's been a long time since I last did a technical audit of a site. I've currently playing with the 'fetch as google' tool to find out if we're blocking anything vital. The site is based on Wordpress, and after a recent hacking incident, a previous SEO moved the login portal from domain.com/wp-admin/ to domain.com/pr3ss/wp-admin/ - to stop people finding it. Fair enough. But they then updated the robots.txt file to look like this: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad-Isap
Disallow: /pr3ss/wp-admin/ Now, some pages are trying to draw on theme elements like: http://www.domain.com/pr3ss/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
http://www.domain.com/pr3ss/wp-content/themes/bestpracticegroup/images/column_wrapper_bg.png And are naturally being blocked (not that this seems to affect the way pages are rendering in Google's eyes) A good SEO friend of mine has suggested allowing the theme folder, and any sub folders where this becomes an issue. What are your thoughts? Is it even worth disallowing the /pr3ss/wp-admin/ path? Cheers guys and gals! All the best, John. I've found a couple of the theme's0 -
Volusion SEO
I have an SEO setting on our Volusion e-commerce store enabled, it is titled "Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp)" I am questioning whether or not this should be enabled for optimal SEO performance. Can anyone provide any advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Importance of having a tightly themed sight and domain for ranking and SEO
I started the site 10 years ago as www.islesurfboards.com selling mainly surfboards and ranking mainly for surfboards, paddle boards came along and now paddle boards make up for 95% of all the business and we are missing alot of ranking in the paddle board related keywords so what is the best course of action? my plans: keep www.islesurfboards.com and keep it surfboards focused, create a new domain www.islepaddleboards.com and move all paddle board related content products etc over to this domain with redirects to transfer the link juice. Doing this will still keep my surfboard site and all its long term domain credibility and i can offer a link over the the www.islepaddleboards.com site for people looking to buy paddle boards and vice versa on the new paddle board site for people looking to shop surfboards. Would this be the best course of action or does can anyone offer any better suggestions. I know google supposodly has taken off much ranking emphasis of the domain but as i pick apart the competition who rank welll in the paddle board space they all have "paddleboards" in the domains and a paddle board specific site to keep it tightly themed which pays off across the board in content, ppc campaigns, and overall ease of use as surfboards and paddle boards are two seperate products and paddle boards is very hot right now so i dont want to stay commited to www.islesurfboards.com domain if its going to create confusion or not help me rank well for paddle boards leading into the future. Any ideas? Thoughts on the best route to take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Read More & SEO
I have just had my site redesigned. The site was designed with only important facts bullets at the top of the page and all other information is below in the read more section that expands when clicked. I am wondering if I need to have this information in the read more section visible to the customer or if having the majority of the text in the read more is OK? and how it will effect rankings having it this way? I have had spots #1 &2 on Google for my keywords- until the site was redesigned...wondering if this was part of the reason. I have moved some of the text up to be visible on some of the pages - but it makes the site look cramped - and competes with the ease of use the site design Any insight on this is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cheri110 -
Where is the Real Value in SEO?
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Squarespace Errors
We have a website hosted by SquareSpace. We are happy with SS, but have done some crawl diagnostics and noticed several errors. These are primarily: Duplicate Page Title Duplicate Page Content Client Error (4xx) We dont really understand why these errors are taking place, and wonder if someone in the Seomoz forum has a firm understanding of SS who is able to assist us with this? rainforestcruises.com thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RainforestCruises0 -
Local SEO (Rankings) + UK-wide SEO (national rankings) - achieving both
Hi All, For clients wishing to sell online / generate leads nationally, yet still want to have a local online presence to attract town / county-wide customers, I've often placed Town / County locations within both the Title Tag (or just County if space is limited) and Meta Description, plus within the Hx headings, Alt-text and within the footer of every page. My question is, does adding the location of the client within these fields really infringe their attempts to rank nationally, as some nationally ranked pages have no mention of location while others have their location (Town, County or Both) shown within them? Any help, insight or feedback greatly appreciated 🙂 Happy New Year Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tony-Dimmock0 -
How to Implement Massive SEO Modifications
Hi everyone, I'm implementing some fairly significant changes on a clients website and wanted to know if it was better to implement all the changes at once or if I should implement the changes gradually. The changes are: 1. Amended information architecture 2. Completely new URL's 3. New meta data and some new on page content 4. Meta robots 'no index, follow' approximately 90% of the site Can I make all these changes in one go (that would be my preference), or should I gradually implement? What are the risks? Many thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjackson1