Google Farmer & W3C Compliance

4 replies
Hi everyone

Just had some guy from Infoserve on the phone trying to tell me that if a website isn't W3C mark-up compliant it will get slaughtered in SERPs.
(My OptimizePress Site has 40 Errors!)

I was under the impression that Farmer was mostly focussed on poor quality content.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks

Neil
#compliance #farmer #google #w3c
  • Profile picture of the author KenThompson
    Was he trying to sell you something?

    Haven't heard that about their latest update - but haven't heard
    everything about it, I'm sure.

    You can google a few terms and check the top positions for W3C
    compliance, though.

    The W3C Markup Validation Service


    Ken
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    • Originally Posted by KenThompson View Post

      Was he trying to sell you something?

      Haven't heard that about their latest update - but haven't heard
      everything about it, I'm sure.

      You can google a few terms and check the top positions for W3C
      compliance, though.

      The W3C Markup Validation Service


      Ken
      Yes Ken... funnily enough a 2 Page W3C compliant website! When I remarked about the lack of content on such a site that is when he gave me the spiel about how W3C was now the most important factor.

      Have checked my site using vailidator.org and there are indeed 40 errors which mostly seem to occur because of the theme I am using (OptimizePress) but was wondering if these will harm my Google ranking.

      Cheers

      Neil
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      • Profile picture of the author KenThompson
        Originally Posted by thesorcerersapprentice View Post

        Yes Ken... funnily enough a 2 Page W3C compliant website! When I remarked about the lack of content on such a site that is when he gave me the spiel about how W3C was now the most important factor.
        BS. Not the most important factor.


        Have checked my site using vailidator.org and there are indeed 40 errors which mostly seem to occur because of the theme I am using (OptimizePress) but was wondering if these will harm my Google ranking.

        Cheers

        Neil

        I don't think the effect will be significant. Quite a while ago, several years
        maybe, I read there was some negative impact on seo if the code was
        trashed-up, sloppy, not vaildated, etc.

        Different seo scoring criteria is assigned a certain amount of value, and you
        will receive positive or negative scores for them. I doubt W3C compliance
        has a large weighted number.

        However, G's algorithm does take browser load times into account. So if
        your site code is so crapped-up that it slows down browser load time, then
        that could come into play.

        I like having clean code, so I would try to clean it up if you can do so
        easily. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it, really.

        If he calls again, tell him something appropriate and probably not what I
        would say.


        Ken
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  • Profile picture of the author DireStraits
    Originally Posted by thesorcerersapprentice View Post

    Hi everyone

    Just had some guy from Infoserve on the phone trying to tell me that if a website isn't W3C mark-up compliant it will get slaughtered in SERPs.
    (My OptimizePress Site has 40 Errors!)

    I was under the impression that Farmer was mostly focussed on poor quality content.

    Can anyone shed any light on this?

    Thanks

    Neil
    I call total bull****.

    Standards-compliant markup doesn't hurt, of course: it can be beneficial for a number of reasons. And search-engines, to varying degrees, do place extra weight on keywords used within "<Hx>", bold and italicised text and so on, but to say definitively that a site with less-than-optimal / non-standards-compliant markup will be slaughtered is a total farce.

    Google themselves state that they don't really care all that much whether a site is standards compliant or not. They index/cache/"read" the text on the page, and that's more or less it. Matt Cutts has said numerous times that it'd be illogical for them to rank lower any site which has less-than-perfect markup, as many sites with highly relevant, authoritative content may have been put together by those who don't have much if any knowledge of professional web design/development. And that's true, of course.

    In any case, look at some of the world's biggest and well-ranked websites. Does Amazon have perfect, up-to-date markup? Nope. Hell, they use tables for all kinds of stuff beyond what they're intended for.

    Microsoft's site has a few validation errors: oops, guess their rankings must've gone down the crapper, too.

    You get the picture.

    What matters the most is the content itself and your off-site SEO (backlinks), not so much what's "under the hood". Make it as best as you can, but don't sweat every single validation error. Not out of SEO concerns, anyway.
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