I was recently asked the following question:
Is code markup validation [through W3C] good for SEO? If so, should I go for Transitional validation or Strict?
The answer was at the tip of my tongue. I knew that:
1 – The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the bar for coding, but are not affiliated with any search engines.
2 – Google (the main search engine most of us care about) doesn’t validate some of their own pages. If they don’t care about their pages being validated, they probably wouldn’t care about your pages being validated either.
3 – The only times I ever had to deal with W3C validation, was when a site I built wasn’t displaying correctly in some browser.
I know that wasn’t much knowledge on my part, but I knew those facts would probably lead me to my answer. Just to be safe I did a little digging and the more I dug, the more I found information supporting my hunch. The point is that W3C is a great resource to find how close to the top coding standards your site is, and to make sure it is accessible throughout different browsers, but it doesn’t really count in terms of SEO. Most blogs and web sites out there don’t validate well, heck! seosurvivor has 60 errors! (still less than Google, YES!) And that doesn’t get in the way of ranking my blog for whatever keywords I may be striving for.
In my educated opinion, W3C is very important for web developers so they can make sure that their web sites are displaying correctly in the different browsers (by the way, here’s a cool place to check your site in different browsers). When is comes to W3C and SEO, don’t spend too much time worrying about it. W3C will improve accessibility, and that’s about it.
