W3C Validation does not matter for SEO

[djbaxter]

W3C Validation & SEO
Yoast.com
June 14, 2010

Most SEO’s seem to agree that having code that isn’t properly nested or has big errors is bad for SEO. They all agree too that it’s not going to get you any better rankings when you really have valid HTML.
My final conclusion thus is: both for web design & SEO reasons, you’ll want to fix any and all blatant errors that might cause bad rendering or parser issues. Don’t worry about attributes that are not allowed though, nor about that one plugin using < B > tags instead of < strong >.. It’s just not worth your time or money.

Don't agree with me? Here's a kicker: even Matt Cutts says there's no bonus for validating, check out the following video:

<EMBED height=385 type=application/x-shockwave-flash width=640 src=http://www.youtube.com/v/FPBACTS-tyg&hl=en_US&fs=1& allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></EMBED>

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[tommyy]

I'm really sorry that the situation is such by Google and I hope that this will change with time. I do validation on my sites and I believe that many webmasters take care of validity their sites.

 

[djbaxter]

There is a difference between validating (making certain that all tags are closed, etc.) and W3C validation. Did you watch the Matt Cutts video for his explanation about why Google doesn't care?

 

[Mike22]

Google doesn't care if your website's HTML and CSS is valid because the search engine has nothing to do with your HTML code. Remember that search bots are not robots standing in front of the computer and using Mozilla FireFox to browse the websites, they are bots and they are interested only in the text (and even the flash text) found on your websites. I always validate my pages to make sure that they are displayed fine for my users (except in IE) but not for SEO proposes.

 

[Sabrina178]

Google doesn't care if your website's HTML and CSS is valid because the search engine has nothing to do with your HTML code. Remember that search bots are not robots standing in front of the computer and using Mozilla FireFox to browse the websites, they are bots and they are interested only in the text (and even the flash text) found on your websites. I always validate my pages to make sure that they are displayed fine for my users (except in IE) but not for SEO proposes.

good point.