How Code Validation Can Affect Your Rankings

Posted by Nick Stamoulis on July 11, 2009
From: searchengineoptimizationjournal

One of the most important aspects of SEO is also one of the most overlooked aspects of on-site optimization - code validation.

It isn’t a matter of whether or not your code is illegal, but whether or not it is acceptable according to search engine standards. Sometimes, a simple matter like not closing certain tags in your HTML can cause you to rank lower in the search engines. But if you validate your HTML before you upload it then you won’t have any issues. Some text editors will do that for you and even correct the substandard code or give you the option to correct it yourself at the click of a button.

There are also sites that you can go to that will help you validate your HTML code.

In general, even invalid code won’t cause you to lose your search engine rankings most of the time. The search engines are concerned with malicious code and content issues that might cause harm to searchers who unwittingly visit a web page because they found it in the search engines. If your invalidated code is harmless then you may not lose rankings at all, but if the search engines do find invalid code on your web pages and cannot verify the security of those pages then you might run into issues. Still, it’s always a good idea to check the validation of a page before you upload it.