SEO-rumors: ranking depends on HTML-validity

Johannes Beus
“Get your sourcecode in order – no wonder you are not ranking” – many sentences like this or similar are favored when, in SEO-forums or -blogs, someone asks why the ranking of their site is not as expected. While it is often presumed that there is no link to the validity of the HTML-sourcecode, I was, however, unable to find a test concerning this. So I took out 1000 keywords – which are a colorful blend of both commercial and noncommercial ones – and, in each case, I took the first hundred results of the search and chased them through a local installation of the W3C-validation. The average number of errors for the 100.000 results in connection to the particular SERPs-position can be seen here


This should prove that there is no connection between W3C-conformity and positions in the SERPs. Having said that, an error-free validation should be desired because that is the only way a conformity with the currently valid specifications can be guaranteed – it is just that this has nothing to do with SEO.

Incidentally, the “front runner” for the number of errors was the Google Groups site with 4392 (!) errors. Only eight percent of all sites were completely without errors.

[Update 04.26.] Adam Lasnik, the small Cutts, has now confirmed this in Thomas' blog: “ No, we do not rankingly reward flawlessly-validating HTML, nor punish not-nicely-validating HTML (unless it's so broken that our otherwise-hardy bot completely chokes on it). There are simply too many outstanding sites (high quality content) with imperfect HTML for us to use this as a reliable signal.”
Johannes Beus - on Wed (04/25/2007) at 12:29 PM

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