W3C validation

[lakedaemon]

Can anyone clarify the benefits of validating html coding using w3c? I didn't realise how many errors a site may have and still appear fine to the end user. All I can think of is that a site that appears fine but has hundreds of errors must impair search engine spidering somehow?

[Brian Turner]

I think the biggest stick is DDA issues - if it's not properly accessible to those with disabilities surfing online, then you could be breaking the law.

W3C validation is the surest way of countering that, IMO.

[TWD-Tony]

Agreed - I don't think W3C validation helps that much with SEO, if a search engine spider can read the code then it will allow your site to be indexed. The quality of your code won't make a difference to your ranking.

There was a lot of talk a while back that there could be a mass of compensation claims against webmasters if there website wasn't accessible to disabled visitors - now there have been a handfull of claims so far but not the "flood" that was predicted... YET

[lakedaemon]

I will be the first to admit thatI haven't taken that into account and it never occurred to me that may be an issue. Are we just talking about alt tags for images here or are there more issues that I have to take into consideration?

[TWD-Tony]

There are a lot of guidlines for W3C validation - just put your site through the HTML validator at www.w3c.org to see how you fair up.
There are lots of things that a disabled person may need to get the same from your site as an abled bodied person - these include using a screen reader or the ability to enlarge your font size (holding shift and scrolling UP).

[mbm]

Creating valid W3C site helps in terms of SEO in the following aspect - the web site usually loads faster. The search engine agent is able to read the whole web page, hence your chance to get in the search engine results is better then if your code has some errors or incompatibity isses that could puzzle the agent.
It also helps for making your web site compatible with the different internet browsers / IE, FF, Opera /

[Brian Turner]

I found one of my news sites was no longer being picked up by the Google News bot. I tracked it down to some invalidate code in a small redesign I did.

Sure, it displayed fine in IE and Firefox, but the newsbot couldn't tell where the content ended.

I often find the validator seems very retentive - but I had to run through it to track the offending code and removed it.

I left in all the validation errors outside of the main content area, otherwise I couldn't get it to display properly.

[SolomonZhang]

Yep, W3C validation won't effect your ranking. It just help those disabled people.

I know, because I have done it :P

The site on my sig is W3C validated (W3C stamps are at the bottom of page). However, I got no increase of ranking or something special from that.

So, that means I'm fullfilling the law huh? No more, no less

[DIY]

Personally I don't care if a site is W3C validated or not. I find it hard to believe that you can make a page in either dreamweaver or frontpage and ftp it to the server and then try and validate it and it will fail. Remove the offending code according to the W3C validator and the whole page does not work!

I would rather have a page that does not validate and looks right than one that does validate but looks wrong.

I think it is a big scam to get people to link back to their site, they must have a PR9 website with all the links that go back to their site.

[monaghan]

You don't have to link back if you have validated.

Why do you need to ftp it to the server in order to validate it, surely most developers have local development & test environments rather than publishing on the live environment?

Why not have a page that looks right and validates ?