Does W3C Validation Help In Search Rankings?

Improve your page rank

Published on September 26, 2004 By Clonmelchat In Blogging

Validating the html and other codes in your website can be a time consuming task. Because validation simply checks the mark up language for proper syntax, I have wondered if using this process will benefit a site when it comes to search engine rankings, and as such, is it worth doing?
There are a number of sites that offer validation tools, but the one I use resides on the W3C web site. The process of validation is simple enough. You simply enter the URL of the site in question or W3C allows you to physically upload a page or a site and the validation tool scans the file and informs the user of any syntax. The corrections are then made by you. Last year while doing my web developement course at Tipperary Institute we used W3Cfor validation using xhtml but after reading some articles is it realy worth the time and effort.

Certainly, there are a number of sites without validity that rank well, so why should you be concerned? "Valid markup does not cut it by itself, it takes a wee bit more than that to get rankings." Meta tags, keywords, valid page links linking back to you from high page ranked sites are some of the ways to improve youe site. This is all good but are you getting the traffic you want, are they customers ready to buy or valid visitors seeking information. Some sites abuse these tools to gain page rank and in return search engines list them in the top 10 but offer poor content related to your search. Googlehas been combating this by changing its methods of ranking a page. The robots have also been abused by sites using one flaw. That is to add fake links starting with £$&* symbols then your keyword to capture all keywords using this gimmick. Paid hits is one way for a business to get visitors but that does not mean your going to sell, so is this worth it.

In the end validation of your site for WC3 is useful if you want to show your visitors that you took the time to code your site to the new approved standards but as for ranking! well it can't hurt and a few minutes to tidy your code might show errors which may have hurt your site in the first place.

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