Quality of Code and SERP

**bbriniotis** · 07-13-2009, 03:59 PM

Originally Posted by azseoguy

Hello all,
what do you guys think about the quality/cleanliness of code in a website structure/page and its effect on SE rankings.

For instance, lets assume we have a good title, heading(s), copy, and anchor text for a given keyword phrase, but the structure (html) of the page is messy. would this have a negative effect on serp?

(The page looks good to the viewer but not so pretty for the crawler)

"Messy"
inline styles, nested tables, javascript in the head, etc.

Of course it matters. Long invalid pages can not be parsed easily by Search Engines. If the html is broken you will have other problems also:
You will not be able to keep the same result for the different browsers, the site will load slower and blind users will not be able to read your site.

**ComputerCoders** · 07-22-2009, 10:44 AM

Search engine spiders have difficulty reading messy outdated code. XHTML and CSS are best. PHP with static urls is also good and can be easier to manage. As mentioned earlier W3C guidelines should be followed. This can be difficult though with the different hacks that should be used for IE to make pages display correctly.

Spiders also look at code to content ratio. If you're using tables for non tabular data the search engine gets confused. But like with anything it's cost/benefit and you must take a holistic view to SEO. Don't spend 80% of your time on an aspect that will only produce small benefits if your time and budget are limited; and whos time and budget are not limited?

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