Is HTML validation necessary for ranking?

[shubhamstunter]

check the validation of my website you will hardly find a bad code.

[agapitoflores001]

If you have some background with HTML, you will easily understand what this thing is all about. Good thing I have prior knowledge that enabled me to understand it quite well.

[duckzeig]

My take on this is: Yes, search engines will still read any HTML (valid or not) but if you think logically - it is quicker for a search engines bot to read through a page of valid markup then if it were invalid. Were probably not talking about a massive gap here but it is a gap non the less. If you have 1 million paragraph elements on your page and they don't have end tags then surely this is harder and slower for a bot to read and interpret then if it were valid code.

[thisiswilson2]

Validation is completely useless, since browsers aren't up to standards, our code *CAN'T*.

[VirtualAssistantv]

Google is flexible.

[azsumbe]

You don't need a Google specific reason in order to write valid code, be professionals.

[candistyx]

@azsumbe But not everyone who makes a website is a professional. I've made a bunch of websites. Talking about my imaginary company which acted as a satire on corporate behaviour. About the sort of intersecting area of physics and physical chemistry and nuclear stuff (I like atoms). Rants about stuff that strikes me.

I even made one perfectly valid one for a university assignment. But most of the time if it looks ok in the browser I don't care. I am not selling my sites I am just communicating.

[cindytsem]

Twin sons of different mothers...

; )

Good advice Danny. Thanks!

[PWSDesign]

Have you guys ever tried to validate any google webpage?

[EverythingBranded]

Will put money down that Google is bulk buying those shirts, let us know if you want Logo's added!

[srikanth94]

euro shit....

[PapendrechtNet]

This is just a very weird Google opinion... consider the following, dear Google: Speed is a measure of quality, right? Why else have you been releasing 'PageSpeed' in order to get websites faster.

Now if you have a validated page, isn't it that a browser will be able to render that page faster???

Just a mere opinion, but I guess every company has its flaws in terms of logic, also Google....

[ribeirobreno]

@PapendrechtNet not that validation should be your life but making a website faster "demands" better code and coders.

[godsboy7777]

Thanks for this video. Haha you wont believe it but one of our SEO clients called me today about their site and the errors it was getting and I explained it just like you did.

I sent him a link of your video.

Thanks Matt

[perltommy]

Did you choose the colors of your shirts on account of the origin of the questioner?

[kisvarosipari]

Thank u google for not being strict on html codes. we cant write every thing right

[larssonk22]

anyone actually checked if google's home page passes validation? it doesn't. Until it does I won't get all hung up over passing validation.

[VideoKursPL]

what about if you make a misstake like you don't close h1 tag etc. it's not valid and it hurts your SEO for sure

[jonno081]

Aaahhhh, I'm either stupid or Matt and Danny got it wrong? They say that the question contains a grammatical error, but I can't find it! Matt read the question incorrectly though... ?? Confused

[ROCKNTV1]

ghey

[GrzegorzWidla]

Polo shirts for the win :-)

[FeldonKTH]

Thx for the answer, didn't really expect but hey guess what they do answer you if you ask them nicely ^^

A followup would be if the code can be to broken. Tweeted Matt this and will wait and see if I get an answer. Would be fun to know if they use a rendering engine to check if the page is viewable and you could use that to see if the page works or not, independently of how it looks in the browsers.

[turxxx]

Who's the guy on the right? Anyone know?

[IamTheEddy]

@turxxx Matt Cutts. 

[jonathanzbecker]

Does this mean that Danny Sullivan now speaks for Google?

[seriocomic]

@jonathanzbecker didn't he always? ;)

[seriocomic]

@jonathanzbecker didn't he always? ;)

[ANDiTKO]

Ok thats a very good question that i was wondering about. But can you please answer to me this:

If Page "A" has the same PR kewords/metadata/text as page "B" but page "B" has a valid code while page "A" dont. Will google show page "B" before "A" because it has valid code?

[fize4ever]

@ANDiTKO It's not my place to say, but if page B has more impact on the site, and has extremely superior content, then I wouldn't be surprised. A F.A.Q in a site of mine ranked ahead of the index page once due to the many insightful answers, but then I built backlinks for the index. ;)

[Carbontm]

I dislike the 'validation' police, you know the ones... they turn javascript off, max out their font size, view every page in 20 different browsers, hate tables, hate frames and always own a crappy website ;)

[RWOverdijk]

@Carbontm Well, I'm one of those people, yet my websites are perfectly fine. It's for sad little twats, such as yourself, that it becomes annoying, as you have no clue on how to solve stuff without hacking around. As long as you know how it works, it's not a problem. (Although I do hate people who support IE6, that's just insane)

[Carbontm]

@RWOverdijk I'll show you mine if you show me yours, websites that is ;)

[FeldonKTH]

@Carbontm well better them than the people who build websites that only works with IE6 because they think no one uses anything else and upgrading to a new version of IE is just to difficult to do...

[aikighost]

@Carbontm Well there is a very good reason to hate frames. They suck :)

[Carbontm]

@aikighost Frames only suck if you don't know how to use them properly. The biggest moans I hear are that search engines will point to content pages which will then load without their surrounding frameset and that frames mess with browser navigation. I have a framed site and it does not suffer from those problems. What frames allow me to do, which otherwise would be very tricky, is to only load the content that changes.

[aikighost]

@Carbontm JSo you are actually talking about AJAX & iframes rather than traditional frames then In which case I say ok, but most people who use frames are not programmers and use them badly.

[Carbontm]

@aikighost Nope, one of my sites uses frameset. I didn't want to name it here because there's too many haters in the world, but what the hell, microbuild fullstop com

[ribeirobreno]

@Carbontm Crappy code makes good websites and good code makes crappy sites? I can't understand... maybe i'm blind? ;)

[Carbontm]

@ribeirobreno Nope, a good website is informative, entertaining, engaging and interesting. How it's coded to acheive that goal is of little importance to the user ;)

[kevpke]

@Carbontm Validation police are worse than grammatical police - hate'm all ;)

[Carbontm]

@kevpke It's hate 'em. Lol ;)

[DutchPow3r]

They have the same sort of shirts lulzz

[TheWebtronics]

@DutchPow3r could be that there's only this kind of shirts in store, maybe everybody at Google wears them... :)

[DutchPow3r]

@TheWebtronics yeah and they are only in Green, Yellow, Blue en Red :)

[kevpke]

@DutchPow3r I'm guessing Danny had to borrow a shirt from Matt... Looks like they are about the same size.

[andradewa19]

they went to the same college?