Does Google care about validation?

Does Google care about Validation? (W3C)

Does Google care about Validation? (W3C Validation)

That is basically why we are here. Though some do not believe in the myth of W3C Validation in correlation to Search Engine rankings in Google, I decided to take the step and try it out for myself.

Now, if you have 5 or 7 errors which are simple capitalization errors or scripts which work perfectly fine, then you have nothing to worry about. However, when you have a 1000 errors, chances are the quality of your page is not so great.

*Gasp* Whats this?

This in itself, should be motivation enough. However, guess what? Even though Google gave w3c a PR10 website, they forgot to follow their own link juice! Google.com has failed validation and has 51 errors with *gasp* No Doctype! Though, before everyone starts freaking out saying they do not think w3c is important, the majority of their errors are the same errors I had almost 500 of. They were capitalization of BR for breaking lines, and not adding quotes for all my variables (because, in all honesty, I prefer not to? - but I figured I should conform to the validator, just this once).

They have a bunch of warnings, but who am I to judge. With dynamic content being updated every minute, I would not be surprised that they have the random error or two (the majority of which are same bgcolors as background colors in tables, so that does not effect the quality of the site - they are just a bit too thorough, hehe).

Errors in Numbers, or in Quality

A few days ago, this blog (when I got the new theme) had a sad 474 errors according to Validator.W3.Org. 474 errors! Personally, the # isn’t what counts, I can have over 250 errors yet my blog could still be running perfectly; the majority of these errors are my own form of coding style and automatically/accidentally capitalizing code. I was pretty surprised, especially when comparing them to other blogs I have seen that are big hitters, for example:

Problogger.net [98 errors]
ThinkBlogger.org [7 errors] - (Oh yea, Take that!)
Johncow.com [Failed Validation] - Sneaky, cant check it due to an unreadable character
JohnChow.com [101 errors]
Showmoney.com [203 errors]
MattCutts.com [5 errors] - now thats validation!
internetdreamer.co.uk [98 errors]

So what is the Point?

What I am trying to get at is instead of theorizing whether or not it will work, realize this: the closer you get to that number 0, the better off your site is in a standard viewing way that could be least harmful to you in the future if they change something around. Like mentioned earlier, if its just capitalization, I’d fix it but try not to lose any sleep over it. If you are not closing your img tags or doing endless breaks, could you really blame yourself if you aren’t ranked #1 in google?

I now only have 7-8 errors and those errors are solemnly due to OTHER websites not being validated. Technorati/Entrecard/Mybloglog/BlogCatalog are the things which are causing those errors, but that is ok. They have custom scripts which work, so I am not worried about it. I must admit, I had some pretty bad errors earlier, so checking it over and changing it around was a good thing.

The Ultimate Experience: To Test it Myself

I have tested this site after I validated it to the best of my ability. I did a few things. A speed test was the first and boy was I ever happy. The overall speed of my site decreased by a few seconds (yet again). I know, some people state that a traffic blog directed towards webmasters shouldn’t worry as most people now have cable modems; despite that, why wouldn’t anyone want a fast website or blog? So yes, my speed has increased which was a major bonus.

The next part which is the most interesting part. Usually if I do not submit anything my traffic falls a bit, though after I validated I had more traffic coming in than before. I know, I know, a bad example, however it jumped pretty nicely. It went from 300-400 *unique* visits daily (on average) to about 600-800. This jump also occurred while I have not been able to post for the last 2 days, so this is quite a nice turn out for me. Especially for a blog that is only nearing 2 months old. I might be able to reach my goal after all, now
Conclusion:

Whether you believe me, or not. I am happy with the results and I am glad that I validated. Some of my errors were rather choppy and fixing them cleaned everything up and made things more organized; so the overall quality of the code to this blog was fixed, if anything. Would you rather not have a blog or site that is free of errors? You decide. It only took me an hour to fix over 460 errors.

Edit: its 9:20pm EST of the same day I posted this. This post was written maybe 2 hours prior. I randomly reached a 1000 visitors today, hah! If only I could have that every day One can only hope. he he he. I didn’t even do much advertising today. Thanks to everyone who visited

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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8 Responses to “Does Google care about Validation? (W3C)”

Jake(31 January 2008 at 5:53 pm)	1
Awesome test. I will do this for a few of my sites. I realized that I have over 600 errors. Not Good. Most of them appear to be what you mentioned earlier with capitalization of FONT or BR or not doing by the looks of it. This will definitely change a bit of my strategy, Thanks!

Technologies blog(1 February 2008 at 11:40 am)	2
my site has 11 errors.

1 Million in 365 Day(2 February 2008 at 1:57 am)	3
That’s something each blogger should care about. I mean having a closer-to-perfection site/blog is what we all fight for right?

SEO Scotland Dot Net(3 February 2008 at 5:08 am)

I think Google cares very little about validation per say as long as the page can be interpreted. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with depreciated tags or pages that lack a relevant doc type. You just need to look under the hood of the top 10 results for any given query for proof.

One of the benefits, among many, that valid CSS driven pages give us is the ability to change the sequence in which information is given to search bots, i.e. the order the information s seen by visitors may not correspond to the order that it appears in the code. Thus you can easily test if navigation before content or vice versa is better received by search engines and so on.

I think that semantics and document structure are far more important and that valid CSS driven pages make this easier to achieve. However, validation for validation sake may be a purist attitude which might only provide a little benefit.

Katy(8 February 2008 at 12:08 am)

I think the bigger picture of validation is not what Google thinks of your page for it but the visibility you’re giving your site to people using screen readers or those that have access issues. Too many people have chalked validation up to what Google thinks or status of a website.

Having said that, my blog has no errors and is completely valid. Additionally, the source code for MyBlogLog, and Entrecard can be edited to validate (and still have both features work).

By the way, your spike in traffic is do to be on the main page for the “blog” tag on StumbleUpon. You can see your site listed by visiting StumbleUpon.

ThinkBlogger(9 February 2008 at 4:08 pm)

@Katy:

I completely agree actually. I do believe w3c can get a little irritating with some of its errors, however I do believe that it is beneficial to screen readers.

What kind of modifications have you done to mybloglog/entrecard in order to validate? I haven’t looked too much into the errors I got from them or technorati, but I did not mind as much.

Also, I am surprised that my main page was on stumbleupon’s main for the tag “blog”. Though, checking now, that is no longer the case hehehe. I have plastered a bunch of blog tags as a filler if I run out of keywords though, that could be an interesting experiment in the future..

Thanks for the find.

Emiliano Jordan(20 August 2008 at 6:22 pm)	7
ThinkBlogger, Is there any followup data to this, did you see any long term changes? Was the spike due to stumbleupon and not W3C Validation? Cheers,

Andrew(21 August 2008 at 12:10 am)

Hey Emiliano Jordan, thanks for the Comment.

Through my experiences with not only this blog but my numerous other websites (which I must softly admit that I have given much more attention to over this blog), I believe that w3c helps.

During the process of the validation, I cleared up A LOT of errors on my site. Remember, I had almost 500 errors, and although most of them were harmless, they made my pages load up a lot slower and included a lot of redundant/inefficient code.

Going though the validation and trying to lower it, not only did I tag a lot of my images (which helped out SEO on this blog), but it shortened my code tremendously and fixed all the little errors.

I believe the impact on SEO changes between different websites and how you coded, but the SEO impact on THIS blog was tremendous. I mean, my last post was in April, and I still manage to get the same amount of visitors that I did back then when I was updating every day.

Not only can it provide beneficial changes to your code (making it more efficient or just fixing horrible coding errors), it can provide a better sense of how to do it properly and how to tag images or close image tags, etc etc.

Like I mentioned, though the benefits change between any different case out there, I noticed a nice improvement It was worth my hour or two of fixing.

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