Does W3C compliance and accessibility impact your Search Engine Optimization
Posted on May 4th, 2007by Michael Gray in SEO, conference
Douglas Karr sent me a question that I get asked pretty often so I thought I’d share it with you here:
Can W3C compliance and accessibility impact your Search Engine Optimization?
Hey Doug thanks for the question, the answer is definitely maybe. Ok well that wasn’t much help but gives me the opportunity to go into a little more depth. From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.
However I do want to talk about XHTML. if you are designing in XHTML with strict compliance you really should be 100% valid. If you have a website that has a high likely hood of winding up on a phone, or other mobile device 100% compliance makes sure your site has a better chance of not “breaking”. Until mobile browsers become more advanced, forgiving and standardized it’s going to be rough going and 100% W3C compliance is a really good idea.
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May 4th, 2007 at 4:34 am
I posted something similar about valid markup affecting search performance some time ago and I have to agree with your comments about html being full of errors leading to SEO trouble. Being compliant doesn’t benefit you (is SEO terms) directly, however many of the processes you go through to get compliant code (in particular using semantically correct markup) will automatically improve your “on page” optimisation without you even trying and the fact that your code is valid will rule out a lot of crawling/indexing issues.
May 4th, 2007 at 5:10 am
I tend to not worry too much about it.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
If Google itself gets 56 errors on a page with an image and a search box, I’m not going to spend too much of my time on it if I’m worried about what they think of my site.
For the record, Yahoo has 33 errors and Live.com has 62.
May 4th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Mike did a roundabout SEO test and to summarize: Yes writing valid HTML matters, but not much.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout-seo-test
May 4th, 2007 at 6:26 am
An entry about why google doesn’t need to validate would be really interesting. :)And who can write that better than you?
May 4th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Awesome! Thanks so much for taking this question public and responding. It can be really frustrating to get a site 100% compliant - especially if you’re working with 3rd party content management systems.
I’ve had great results with the improvements I’ve been making from a structure and content standpoint, and I think that’s where I’m going to continue to focus my attention!
Thanks again! I really appreciate it.
Doug
May 4th, 2007 at 9:30 am
There are all sorts of reasons why it would be wise for a website to be W3C compliant. The simplest one I can think of is the fact that browsers, current ones and future ones, will break your website when it has errors. Of course, the browsers can also break your website when it is compliant because of their own bugs (just look at advanced CSS-support in some browsers)….
Anyway; when you’re setting up a website (especially when you hand-code) you need to keep the different browsers in mind. You have the greatest chance of compatibility when writing W3C compliant code and chances are good that you won’t have to redo everything when the new IE, FF or whichever comes out.
I am quite sure that W3C compliance does not ‘help’ your SEO in such a way that the more compliant you are the higher your ranking. It can hurt your ranking though when it is so terrible that spiders can’t read it, but before that happens I think your browser will have alerted you to the problem.
May 5th, 2007 at 1:27 am
Great advice on the ever contentious ‘do I validate?’ argument.
My view is it’s the first step to setting a great foundation to an SEO friendly website. You don’t have to get every validation error (as hacks for cross-browser compatibility will usually not validate) but you should keep your code clean and well structured.
Faster loading pages are better for spider crawls, more people accessing your site (re: accessibility) means more traffic = good SEO.
I worry when people just concentrate on the large, quick wins. It should be about all the small things as well.
May 5th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Excellent Article and Discussion..
I do agree with Scott comments that our web page code should be clean and well structured. Also if we can make sure about “clear URL” that would be even great.
Thanks.
May 6th, 2007 at 5:01 am
Excellent article. Thanks.
May 14th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I’m a bit too tired at the moment to digg up the link, but this has been a periodic debate for some time among SEOs. The fact is that W3C compliance is a gateway drug with a lot of positive side effects. First, interoperability, semantics, code/content separation etc. The reality is that coders that learn W3C standards move (hopefully) move on to advanced coding techniques and furthered understanding of semantics. Advanced coders learn how to structure a page to yield the best possible presentation (of markup) to the SE, while rendering an engaging user interface using CSS and JS. So does W3C compliance give better SEO - no. There are tons of convoluted non-compliant table-based sites/pages out there that rank just fine. If I go ahead and clean those up will they rank better, convert better and save some money on bandwidth - yes. But that’s more web site optimization than it is SEO. In the end, put them all in your bag of tricks and you’ll be fine.
June 6th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Excellent article. Thank you very much.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:06 am
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