There is a current debate in the SEO/M community concerning Google Rankings and Code Validation. The issue can be stated in the question – Do the search engines care about a websites valid code? This question alone does not show the relationship between search engines and valid code, so I will add some questions of my own.
- Do the search engines give value to sites with valid code? It is generally thought within the SEO/M community that they do not explicitly or noticeably give special credit to websites with valid code. Many will argue that this can be tested by simply looking at sites with invalid code consistently coming up with #1 rankings on the search engines. I think this argument has some obvious weaknesses, but the generally accepted answer to the question here is NO.
- Does having valid code affect search engine ranking? It is also generally accepted in the SEO/M community that the answer to this question is NO. However, some have claimed that they have noticed a difference in their search engine rankings by only improving code validation. Recently a friend in the SEO/M community claims that he also noticed a big difference in search engine ranking by correcting code validation errors.
- Does having valid code affect your site’s search engine performance? The argument here is that having certain invalid code such as open/close tags that are missing can affect what the search engines use as a description, cache, or presentation of your site. Although I have never seen this, others claim that they have seen the search engines display information about their site that was a result of open/close tag problems for example. I tend to think that the search engine bots (robots/spiders/etc.) have some AI or smart technology to be able to recognize code errors and fill in the gaps. The answer to this question seems to remain a mystery.
I tend to think that this is not a major issue affecting the SEO/M community because any affect that code validation may have on your site has little to no consequence. Nevertheless, code validation can help you identify some presentation problems on your site, and if some of the SEO/M marketers are correct in their testing of positive differences in the search engines because of code validation, well, you just might be better off with a “better safe than sorry” mentality when it comes to Google Rankings and Code Validation. Most SEO/M companies recommend having valid code on your site(s).
