W3C and SEO- Any relation?

by aduer

Posted: 14 years ago 15 replies

I have recently completed a free online SEO trainning course and on it were many references to items that need to be tested on the website's code to get maximum SEO benefits. Besides the usual stuff such as keywords in the title, H1 tags, etc., the material also indicated that the website code should comply with W3C standards and suggested to use one of many W3C validation tool freely available on the net.

I tried some of these tools on a variety of Wordpress sites that use different themes (including free and premium themes). and the results were very similar; many many errors, warnings, and suggestions.

Is this typical to a wordpress based site or it is something that I must address to improver ranking?

AmI making too much of a deal?

Is W3C important for SOE?

BTW, the training also provided access to some awesome free tools that you should check (no affiliate here) and at the end of the training you get a nice certificate

SEO in Practice - Free SEO Book For Internet Entrepreneurs

The more I study SEO the more confused I get :confused:

Armando

#question #relation #seo #w3c

CDarklock 14 years ago

Originally Posted by aduer

Is W3C important for SOE?

Internet browsers are designed to support W3C standards. If your site doesn't meet the standards, it may not display correctly in all browsers.

Of course, if it does meet the standards, it still may not display correctly. But then it's the browser's fault and not yours.
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DigiSumo 14 years ago

Hi, creating a valid W3C site has It's advantages as the search engines love a well structured site and clean code. I wouldn't say It would affect your SEO rankings to much if your site did not validate.Mark
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christopher jon 14 years ago

It's not going to kill your rankings but it's also not a bad idea to keep your code somewhat compliant.

Much of it depends on what the errors are.

Google isn't going to penalizing you for using <BR> instead of <BR /> but WC3 will ding you every time.
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Abledragon 14 years ago

Hi Armando,

The benefit of being W3C compliant is that the chances of your sites being rendered consistently across all browser types is greatly increased. As CDarklock has said, though, it's not a guarantee.

The problem with running a WordPress site through the W3C validator is that embed codes will usually cause it to freak out. As can the code in plugins or themes.

On my site the YouTube embed code and an old Aweber code generated hundreds of warnings.

And even the core WordPress code itself generates errors because when you insert a link and select the option to open it in another window, WordPress will apply the "_blank" attribute - but this is not a valid attribute in XHTML, which is what WordPress is written in.

In some cases you're not going to be able to do much about the errors that are thrown up. So what I do is check through the errors and look for anything that is within my control - such as code in text widgets, my feature box, my multi-media box etc. Anything that I've written.

I correct those errors, but the rest I usually ignore.

In some cases running your site through the W3C validator can help your SEO because it will identify missing 'alt' tags on images.

Cheers,

Martin.
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Brad Callen 14 years ago

Google rep's have said that this doesn't directly influence your rankings, but it can be an issue if they can't index your site properly. Make sure you fix the errors and check the crawler errors in webmaster tools.

I really like the resources in Chrome's dev tools. Prioritizes your code issues too!

From where I'm sitting, Yoast is always one side of the story that I tend to side with on whatever topic he is writing about. Here is his take on W3C and SEO.. he also has asked: Aaron Wall, Greg Boser, Brent Payne, Dennis Goedegebuure, and Jaimie Sirovich about it. Check it out: http://yoast.com/w3c-validation-seo/
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bgmacaw 14 years ago

It is easy to do a little studying of ranking sites and their W3C compliance and figure out that W3C has zero bearing on SEO.
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dipenmehta 14 years ago

basicly w3c is content related. w3c is important for our site because it saw what error in website.
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mvpsandeep 14 years ago

w3c validation gains readability level of page, so its a seo factor
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seoforu 14 years ago

Having a W3C supported website is good for Seo. It is not necessary but it is always good to have a website which is compatible on all platforms, so we should always try to have W3C compatible website.
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- HeatMap 14 years ago
  
  There are some kinds of errors that matter and some which are not worth bothering about.
  
  The kinds of errors that are a real problem are the ones that would stop a bot or a browser making sense of your site content. For example if a site had a missing HTML closing tags for important elements then a bot or browser would have a hard time figuring it out and that would be bad for SEO.
  
  Most WordPress themes will have a few minor warnings particularly in CSS, and there even a few CSS errors which WordPress itself has built in, but in a well constructed theme these will be of minor importance and will not affect your rankings.
  
  In themes where the author actively maintains and develops the theme, the theme author will have carefully weighed the benefit of allowing a particular warning.
  
  Benefit to a warning? you ask...
  
  Heres an example... In a theme, the author might have to make a slight concession on a minor warning in order for the theme to work on a wider range of browsers, particularly ie6 and ie7. Like for instance if you want <ul> lists to behave nicely around a floated image on some browsers then you have to include a non-standard bit of css in order to make it work. This would be of no detriment to your SEO.
  
  If the theme you use is very popular and professionally maintained, chances are that you dont have to worry much about the minor warnings, as they already been weighed and considered.
  
  Do look out for major structural errors though in themes which are not so popular or actively maintained.
  
  I find that the major source of SEO busting errors by new WordPress users though usually comes from inexpert cutting and pasting of code into wordpress posts or widgets, or plugins that are not quite configured correctly.
  
  Your theme might be fine, but the other things you add to WordPress all have to be checked for issues too (including your own content)
  
  Hope that helps
  
  Thanks
  
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  miranon 14 years ago
  
  Look at your competitors in #1 and #2 in google serps, do they validate trough the The W3C Markup Validation Service ? That will be your answer.
  
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claritytech123 14 years ago

If we follow w3c rules when we are doing SEO for any site then it would help our site to rank well in search engines.
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iobeek 14 years ago

I always check all my pages for validation. I go even further sometimes and put a link to w3c into the footer. I don't know if it helps but it certainly doesn't hurt.
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aduer 14 years ago

Thanks everybody for all your suggestions. I am new to all these issues and I had a lot of questions on this subject and as always got a lot of information from fellow warriors.

I also run some other sites (not mine) through W3C compliance tools and found same errors and these sites rank better than mine so I guess that W3C is good but will not kill me

Maybe I am making a big deal out of something that it is not
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- Marketing Ignite 14 years ago
  
  its a myth that having your site w3c compliant would help your rankings. Google has also confirmed this that it will not help you from a ranking factor but its good to use so that browsers may display your site more accurately. personally i feel its over rated..
  
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