SEO Myth – “Google Favours W3C Validiated Web Pages”

Does Google favour web pages with perfect HTML code or will it happily accept one with coding (syntax) or validation errors? Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts (shown in this video on this topic) has said for many years that demoting webpages which don’t validate to the W3C standard is not something Google will ever consider.


Some web developers and so-called “SEO experts” will argue that compliant code will work in every web browser and take less time for a web spider to crawl and take the data/content out.  Therefore all search engines must prefer properly written code and rank web pages higher that meet standards.


It does take longer (and costs extra!) for search engines to crawl broken webpages on the world wide web. The main problem is that pages containing amazing information or content could be ignored due to a simple HTML error, also novice bloggers and hobby style websites would be unfairly held back if W3C standards were used as a ranking factor.

Google and all the other search engines want to provide the best results for all of their users, it would be a slippery slope if all the voices of non-technical savvy users were muffled!

So why is the odd HTML error not an issue on web pages?  All popular browsers automatically try and fix any broken or invalid HTML code, funnily enough Google own homepage doesn’t even validate to save on download times – check out the results here.


Would you leave a restaurant if you saw a typo in the menu?  Would you ignore someone at a party who spoke with a lisp? Google doesn’t favour W3C standardised web pages; search engine users want to present the best information from the most reliable sources possible, whether that might be from a big corporation or the casual blogger down the road.


The only way invalid code can do any harm is if the page DOESN’T show properly in certain browsers; make sure to test out your main web page templates on all the major browsers such as:


- Firefox
- Internet Explorer (6, 7, 8 & 9)
- Safari (on Mac and PC)
- Chrome
- Opera


Download all these browsers and use tools such as IE Tester (Windows) to test out the different versions of Internet Explorer to ensure your HTML displays correctly despite any minor errors.  Once you are happy that your site displays how it should do then stop worrying about valid/invalid code and concentrate on what really matters towards SEO.

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Posted on 12:11 AM by Rome | 0 Comments