Code validation is an issue that has been tossed back and forth in the SEO world for years. The W3C's standards appear to have the general support of the validation and standards organizations across the Internet, thus leading SEOs to ask the leading question,Does having validated code help with search engine rankings
The general consensus on the issue has been a resounding NO. Authorities from every forum, SEO company & private sector appear to agree that search engines would be remiss indeed to reward W3C valid code. However, many SEOs have noted that the advatanges from having valid code are worthwhile, regardless of rankings. The most prominent among these being that search engines can understand exactly what your page is trying to say, without getting confused.
To check your own code for validation, visit the W3C's HTML code validation tool.
w3c is good to keep the code simple and error free, and helps in making your site load easily but it does not help in ranking higher...
I admit I used to write sloppy html code and not care about all the errors and warnings thrown up by the w3c validator. After all, if the site works that's all the matters, right? My wake-up call came when a number of customers told me a website didn't work on AOL. The reason: urls not enclosed in quotes. It worked perfectly on every other browser, just not AOL.
Just because the site works in one browser doesn't mean it will work in others (or even in newer versions of the same browser). Validating your html code gives you at least some insurance that your site isn't likely to break on another browser.
I still see many sites that don't work properly in firefox, even though over 50% of visitors to some sites (for example ours) use firefox.
It's pointless doing SEO on a site, only to lose half your visitors because your site doesn't actually work properly on their browsers.
I notice that the seomoz.org homepage currently has quite a lot of errors, mostly due to missing close tags, which could potentially cause problems on certain browsers or confuse search engines.
Yes there is no any direct connection of W3C Code and search engine ranking but it improves your website design and free from any design errors. Thanks.
yeah, i always ask my self why w3c is important. Surely it is very good but i think that is not all because ex: i checked seomoz.org still you have mistake, right. And a lot of website if we check by validator can not pass, why?
SEO is out and in all very very important html is also.
w3c still important with S.E maybe longer if that how we can follow the code, pls show me?
Then why should we validate the code, I was looking NYTimes page source and I saw over 400 errors, same for CNN and Amazon, so why W3C still important, some people spend hours fixing their codes to accomplish with the w3c standards, but guys don´t waste all your time on that, just fix as much as you can cause maybe one day google will add some extra value to that
I'm going to have to agree. If the page appears to look how you want it in your browser and perhaps a couple other major browsers, why make sure every little detail of the code is "up to standard" when you get no search engine credit for it? I think search engines should give credit for it. It should be a mark of quality right?