W3 Validation - Is It a Waste of time??

**johnafrankllin** · 06-17-2008, 09:57 PM

Hi,
It is really till now not clarified that the W3 validation that we do is really a waste of time or It gives some benefit to our site.
Since in many cases I have seen some sites rock the web in terms of SERP and is not a valid HTML or XHTML Document.
See the case of "web design" (without quote) keyword in google.com, here you will find the site at no 2 is not a valid HTML or XHTML Document but ranks well in SERP.
In the same way you type "seo forum" (without quote) in google.com and you will find forums.seochat.com ranks no 1 with an invalid markup.
So do we really not waste our time in doing validation, since by doing this we try to make our web page search engine friendly, and a site if rank well in major search engines means that it is SE friendly in whatever way the search engine spider looks at it.

**tb987** · 06-17-2008, 10:26 PM

The benefit is the knowledge that it will render properly in all users browsers. If you are just targetting IE and Firefox then you need not worry. From an SEO perspective it could be so bad that you are tripping up the browsers used by the search engine spiders - I think this is unlikely.

**smeagain** · 06-17-2008, 11:14 PM

You could take comfort in the fact that you can turn out shoddy work and in most cases it won't affect SEO or you could just do the job right.

**johnafrankllin** · 06-18-2008, 05:37 AM

Originally Posted by tb987

The benefit is the knowledge that it will render properly in all users browsers. If you are just targetting IE and Firefox then you need not worry. From an SEO perspective it could be so bad that you are tripping up the browsers used by the search engine spiders - I think this is unlikely.

Thanks for your opinion,

But I don't think that the seochat would not be targeting the users who are using opera, safari, netscape etc. Why don't these big names bother about the validation?

Regards
John

**KingPin** · 06-18-2008, 02:03 PM

Validation is good for one thing only and that's for the users and their browsers.

As for SEO, it makes no odds if the site validates or not.

KP

**headdown** · 06-18-2008, 04:03 PM

Got to agree with that. Getting a page validated does produce better code that could be easier to spider, but doesn't directly help the serps.

**Alan** · 06-18-2008, 04:10 PM

Originally Posted by headdown

Got to agree with that. Getting a page validated does produce better code that could be easier to spider, but doesn't directly help the serps.

Absolutely right. It's nothing to do with SERPs or PR come to that. Its a check that the code conforms to the accepted specifications.

**johnafrankllin** · 06-20-2008, 07:57 AM

Thanks to all,
You all may be right (or must be), then why the site like wikipedia believes in this and for whom it makes its all the pages error free?? Also it has not given any link on the page to show its visitor that the page is valid XHTML document.

Regards
John

**ohsuria** · 06-20-2008, 08:56 AM

Interesting topic, I never analyze about this valid xhtml..
until now I always try to make my site to be valid.

if your html has one missing tag in the middle of your html.. but it still display correctly in firefox or ie.
will spider only crawl your half top content..? as it thinks your half bottom page is wrong..?

for example:

Code:

<html>

<p>
bla bla bla..
</p>

</div>
will this content still be crawled?
</div>

</html>

Please kindly advise and correct me if I'm wrong..

**johnafrankllin** · 06-23-2008, 09:00 AM

The search engine spider will read it as

<html>
<p>
bla bla bla..
</p>
will this content still be crawled?
</html>

It will ignore whatever it will not understand.
Since it will not find starting tag for DIV so it will ignore the closing tag for it.

Am I right?
please suggest someone.

regards
John