Is HTML validation necessary for ranking?
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Uploaded by GoogleWebmasterHelp on Mar 15, 2011
Hi Matt, in a previous video you stated that validation of HTML wasn't really important for ranking/SEO. This confuses me, would Google really want to send it's users to websites which would be broken for a lot of them? Jimmy "@Feldon" Wirsborg, Stockholm, Sweden
Russian subtitles provided by Mike Shakin.
Note: the grammatical error was fixed in the video, but the question as submitted can be seen above.
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- 88 likes, 2 dislikes
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Top Comments
All Comments (49)
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check the validation of my website you will hardly find a bad code.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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Validation is completely useless, since browsers aren't up to standards, our code *CAN'T*.
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Google is flexible.
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@kevpke It's hate 'em. Lol ;)
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@Carbontm Validation police are worse than grammatical police - hate'm all ;)
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@DutchPow3r I'm guessing Danny had to borrow a shirt from Matt... Looks like they are about the same size.
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They have the same sort of shirts lulzz
DutchPow3r 11 months ago 28
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 ;)
Carbontm 11 months ago 16