Valid Source Code Helps SEO?

Posted on June 23, 2007 by Nate Whitehill

I just read an interesting article at Search Engine Journal claiming valid source code helps spiders better index your site. I’ve known about the importance of validating, but I had no idea it affected how your site was indexed.

What is Validation?

According to the W3C:

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

The article gives a few tips including:

  • Use W3C to make sure your site is viewable in major browsers, especially Firefox & Safari
  • Test your site on mobile browsers
  • Check for all errors in HTML coding and fix them when possible

If you are interested in learning about the benefits of valid source code and how it could help SEO, then read SEO & Importance of Valid Source Code.
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  • http://www.dyphan.com A Tentative Personal Finance Blog

    My site looks horrible on a mobile device. Any advice on how to make it look slick?

    • http://fundszine.com Make Money With Funds

      Sure. Make sure it’s valid as xHTML Transitional plus check if it’s readable when CSS is turned off.
      Firefox has a feature to turn off CSS: Menu->View->Page Style -> No Style.

      If it looks ugly and unreadable without CSS, then you need to work on the site’s layout…

  • http://www.disassociated.com/ John Lampard

    Good article. In a lot of cases if you are working with XHTML and CSS anyway making your code standards compliant can sometimes be quite simple. Even just changing things like the ampersand (&) to & in your code, or closing image tags with /> rather than > can make all the difference.

  • http://www.mrgarylee.com Gary Lee

    argh . they didn’t teach this stuff in web design 101 at Irvine . . . .

  • http://florchakh.com Florchakh

    Do you give your trust, Nate? Take a look at this and tell me – are they reliable?

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.searchenginejournal.com

    • http://natewhitehill.com Nate Whitehill

      Just because their site doesn’t validate does not mean they are not a trustworthy source. I have actually read a lot of good material at Search Engine Journal. Even Google’s homepage does not validate. It is actually pretty rare when a site is perfectly XHTML valid. Nonetheless, they raise some interesting points as does John Lampard about how pages determine content vs. code when there are tags left open and other inconsistencies in the source code.

      • http://florchakh.com Florchakh

        Let’s say there is a batch of tags that you have to use correctly. But definitely it doesn’t means that your page must be valid to be ok with Google, right?

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  • http://www.watchthisvid.com Frank

    I think that it’s a little unfair to penalise sites for sloppy code, if this is indeed the case. The web should be about the ability to publish and have a voice. When only a small percentage of site owners are coders then it disadvantages everyone else. I believe compliance is a good thing that everyone should strive for but to negatively impact your SERPS for non-compliance is a bit harsh.

  • http://fundszine.com Make Money With Funds

    I know that Adsense bot will not parse your site if it’s not valid… so, it really does help.

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  • http://www.davidairey.com/ David Airey :: Creative Design ::

    With the amount of third party code on my site it would take an age to validate my archives. I found YouTube videos in particular to be a source of incorrect validation.

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  • http://www.nathandrach.info Natron

    I have a few sites that are 100% valid xHTML, didn’t notice any improvement in SERPs. I still think it’s good practice, “Leave no rock unturned”

  • http://www.alimadzi.com Patrick Lee

    Valid code is good in that one may avoid a lot of layout/formatting bugs that could otherwise creep into a design. But saying that valid code helps SEO is really oversimplifying things. As another commenter noted, Google’s own home page doesn’t even validate.

    One thing that DOES help SEO is using external CSS and JS files instead of cramming it all into your HTML files. This increases your keyword density because Google makes no distinction between actual text, HTML formatting, CSS, JS, or anything else. This is also better from a maintenance and performance standpoint, so it’s good all around.

  • http://www.kingnomar.com Nomar

    hmm I didnt know thise.. good article :)

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  • http://www.iamkarthik.com/ Blogging Tips

    Validating is an important thing, whether we like it or not – but I’ve known a few sites that look differently in different browsers although they are validated, so I guess validation doesn’t catch everything.

  • http://www.wtricks.com/webmaster-blog Wtricks

    I have paid more attention lately to a cleaner code and I think this can help me more. by coding myself the layouts and working on the SEO as I type I do give myself more chances to actually increase my sites’ chances for a better place in the searches and some more traffic.

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  • http://www.freeipodsetc.co.uk Mike Touch

    Reading the original post I got worried but then I read the comments and saw how a site doesn’t have to be validated to get good rankings. This is good to know as my site doesn’t have valid XHTML at the moment.

  • http://www.jordankasteler.com/utah-seo-pro-blog/ Utah SEO

    I agree it may be a minimal quality score factor but nothing beyond minimal. If you are optimizing a site and look at ROI on time spent this one should be at the bottom of the list.

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  • http://www.qa6b.com turki

    agree it may be a minimal quality score factor but nothing beyond minimal. If you are optimizing a site and look at ROI on time spent this one should be at the bottom of the list

  • http://ronaldredito.org/blog/ Ronald Redito

    I once bumped into a site where it shows you how your site looks on other browsers. My site looks good on Firefox, IE and Chrome, does this source codes affects the layout?