Does W3C valid code affect search rankings?

The W3C provide the W3C Validation and CSS Validation tools which help to check the HTML and CSS on a page respectively and pick up on any errors to make sure your code complies with web standards. There is an on-going debate as to whether clean, valid coding on a website plays an important role or not on search engine rankings. Many are convinced it is crucial in search engine optimisation, that by having a clean coded site, this will ensure that it will get crawled more easily, thus ranking better.

Although it is true that uncluttered, validated code can aid search engine crawlers around your site, it does not affect rankings in any way. As Google’s main focus is on the user, they are more concerned with how a site displays on different platforms and browsers; your code may be perfectly valid and display fine in Firefox, but may look completely different or even unusable in Internet Explorer or on a mobile device.

Another reason is that far too many sites just wouldn’t pass the validation process and would cause too dramatic an effect in the search results – sites will drop from their existing rankings and will have to re-design or completely re-code their sites in order to crawl their way back up.

However, it is always best practice to code to W3C standards, by ensuring your code is as clean as possible from the start. Clean, valid code will not only help increase the loading speed of a page which already plays a minor role in the rankings, but may well be a ranking factor in the near future and then you will be one step ahead of the game.

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer