Though this article on importance of W3C validation is written here for WordPress users, the basic things will be same for Blogger, Joomla, BBPress, phpBB, DotNuke etc platform users.
A site is not good if it is not W3C validated?
It is very rare to find on Internet that Web sites those are 100% valid (about 5% of websites indexed on Google pass W3C validator). Always maintaining a site with 100% valid W3C is difficult and those that use an HTML editor in a CMS know how these system generate faulty codes.
So be assured, the search engine Google does not penalize the pages which have not passed the W3C validator, Google has been very clear on this point.
But we must understand the importance:
SEO includes multiple parameters (relevance of content, number of visits, site age, quality of incoming and outgoing links, clean code etc).
How can you isolate one of these parameters and tell how this parameter will influence on others, while Google’s algorithm is kept secret, it is hard to know and if this algorithm has bugs?
We know that HTML tags those are not closed mislead search engines to do mistake, this is one reason why we link between W3C and SEO.
Let us ask a similar question:
W3C validation provides a better ranking?
Iif your website is already good, you will give it a boost, just from our the experience.
Make your site comply with W3C standards
Make your website W3C specification compliant is critical for quality control. However, creating a site and valid W3C is not easy. For proof, take one or two addresses of your favorite websites and do a test at W3C validation website. You will find that few web sites are 100% valid.
Now test our two websites: https://thecustomizewindows.com and http://dailymedico.com. As you can see, TheCustomizeWindows has six errors and DailyMedico has zero errors ; that is the later is a W3C validated website. Wait, this is not so easy. Go to an inner page of Dailymedico; suppose http://dailymedico.com/2011/03/what-is-multiple-sclerosis-and-its-line-of-management/ there are 14 errors.
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What we want to say is, one website does not consist of only home page: it does consists of the posts, the pages, archives etc. If Google takes W3C validation as one of the factor to determine its rank, it will definitely count the errors of inner pages too.
Now, if you look closely at the third example, you will notice the errors are generated by three main sectors:
- Plugins those were not injecting HTML output in the home page is injecting errors in post page
- Advertisements div id manually inserted by us
- Some extra CSS scripts those were not called at homepage
These are correctable errors; no special knowledge is required. Just deactivate the plugins responsible (it is quite clear that Related post plugin is inserting the errors. CSS can be polished and those div id can be deleted.
The page most important to check to make as much as possible error free is the Sitemap (both xml and human readable sitemap). Because, for obvious reason, Google will crawl this page on a regular basis, and to make the crawl easier, it is better to make it error free.
In upcoming posts, we will discuss on how to make (or at least try) your WordPress website W3C validated.
