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There are lots of interesting theories out there about how one can get there site to rank better in search engines. Unfortunately much of this advice, while it would make since, is wrong.
One example is that correct, valid HTML code is important for search engines to read your website, and thus for you rank highly.
This makes sense for several reasons:
- bad code may not be read by a search engine as it doesn’t know what it sees,
- search engines want to promote good code, to clean the web of garbage, or even
- bad coding appears unprofessional, and therefore is likely to be web spam/fraudulent/etc.
Unfortunately, there is little evidence that any of these statements are true.
First, lets consider that it is estimated that over 99% of the web is made up on invalid HTML code [source]. If this is the case, could you imagine being the search engine which cannot read those pages, or which pages you would be able to read. A search engine which only searched valid HTML pages would find so little, that no one would really use it.
Search engines, while many do claim they want to promote good clean HTML pages, also realize search engines need to promote finding appropriate information on the web. While a web designed might find valid HTML important, the common user is more interested in finding out about the new digital camera, how to download a ring tone to his phone, or other related information.
Of course the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So I took several random search queries. If the given hypothesis is true, then the top search engine rankings will have clean, or nearly clean code.
The first item I searched for was “shoes”. The top three results, in order was:
- Shoes.Com – has 253 errors and 124 warnings on there homepage [source]
- Zappos.com – has 144 errors and 101 warnings [source]
- payless.com/store/ – has 81 errors and 22 warnings [source]
I also checked two other popular search terms “travel”, (expedia.com with 154 Errors and 194 warnings [source]) and doctor (webmd.com/physician_finder/ with 101 Errors and 32 warnings [source]).
Given that these are popular search terms, one would think that search engines code find plenty of valid HTML webpages. However, it decides to rank these. And as you can see with the shoes examples, the further down in the search results you went, the “better” the web page. So, based upon this basic information, I would have to say that any boost a search engine gives you based upon valid HTML code is limited or more likely imaginary.
Does this mean we shouldn’t develop valid HTML websites? NO!
Instead, look at developing content which a search engine wants to see. I assume that if my browsers can read it, the major search engines can read it. We should develop new code to be valid, but not worry about fixing old code if it is working. There are clearly other things that we can do to make our sites more search engine friendly.
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About Walter Wimberly