HTML Code Errors & SEO

I have received this advice:

Here's where I would start to improve your search engine ranking:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.Time4Learning.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline

It's always good to have code that validates!
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I've checked my site and most pages have dozens and dozens of errors. I know that google says that they care about errors,
- what do you think?
- Does it make a tangible difference?

And if it does make a difference...
- Does the Dreamweaver function for automatically fixing errors work?
- Do I need to fix it by hand, page-by-page?.
- Does anybody know someone who specializes in doing this?

The problem is that a dozen different people have worked on the site with us constantly making improvements to the template so we have different types of errors on our different types of pages. Of course, we'd like to do a total rework but thats not in the budget for awhile....
john
homeschool curriculum

More data:

I have started to register with google for a site map but only got as far as validating my site which has earned me access to some new data.

They have some info on site errors including HTTP errors. Their indicator shows only a tiny shading and the only listed error is a 404 with the URL (which doesn't exist): http://www.time4learning.com/om/alpha/Signup_Parent_Information.aspx .I've searched around and not been able to find that typo so I'm not sure what to do about it. They do seem to have indexed 231 pages on my domain.

Sadly enough, I am not doing well on the terms that I most care about such as homeschool curriculum . I am getting alot of traffic and queries from people typing in my company's name: time4learning . Go figure.......

Errors matter in so far as it makes the site difficult/slower to render, and harder for people/bots to understand if a site is error-strewn.

I don't know about Dreamweaver... sorry. But web code checking and fixing is something that I do, by hand. The service I offer is making code XHTML valid, CSS valid and have it meet accessibility standards. Drop me a PM and get in touch.

For some reason, this forum is not letting me do a private mail (is that what PM meant?). I would be interested in a quote to clean up some pages, what would you charge for my home page: http://www.Time4Learning.com ?

I'm john at that same domain....

Here is some research that attempts to answer the question about code error's impact on seo....

Code Errors Seem Empirically to NOT matter today


His research of top sites is not conclusive but highly suggestive. It would be cool if someone actually created and promoted a suite of sites, some perfect, some with errors to see if there's any impact.

BTW - it bugs me that google says that code quality matters but it doesn't. How can they expect us to be white hat if they are not stating their rules right?

John - learning to market my home education website

I have not read the mentioned research, but i think that a properly coded page is going to get indexed, and crawled more often.

But I guess it all goes back to the fact that you should make sure that the site looks the best for the people viewing it. Most likely, there are some users out there that use a browser that will not correctly interpret and incorrectly coded page.

I would be interested in helping you out with getting the coding standardized. PM with some details as to how many pages you have, and in what format you would like them, and I will give you a quote.

Also, use this tool, and see if there are as many problems as you think.
http://validator.w3.org/

As much as I have used dreamweaver, the code helper creates more problems then just using the above tool. I have dreamweaver set to 4.01 Transitional and it will keep the coding clean, until you start editing the pages yourself.

It's nice if your site validates, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. As long as users can view/use your site and it displays to them how you want it to. I haven't seen any evidence to support properly formed code ranking better. Then again it can't hurt.

The only thing that would help you with search engines is if you have a lot of useless code on your page, I think search engines sometimes look at the code to content ratio. And it also helps your bandwidth bills if you're not throwing out 20k of useless code per request.

Hi there,

Its nice to have HTML error-free site. Google does not penalize HTML errors.

By the way if you want, we can provide you FREE SEO ranking report. Just send email to me at Ankur@aceinternetmarketing.ie -I am SEO Expert at AceInternetMarketing.

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