Hi,
Who are WWWC? Why do they set standards for WWW? Why do they want to lead the web to their full potential? Do we want to validate our sites with W3? Is that much of important to work out for SEO’s?
W3C recognizes is important because its assurance and social phenomenon, but technology architecture can advance assurance and confidence. As added action moves on-line, it will become alike added important to abutment circuitous interactions amid parties about the globe.
Its important but a little. Many good websites with high pagerank and big traffic, have many errors when you check them by W3C validator.
I’m certainly not trying to condone cruddy pages, but I’m afraid that isn’t true. As long as Google thinks it can understand your page, it doesn’t actually care if it doesn’t validate (which is no great surprise). Google is in the business of giving surfers the best possible set of pages for their search terms, and if they were to act as net police and penalise sites that didn’t validate, they wouldn’t be fulfilling their purpose properly.
That doesn’t mean it’s OK to have pages that don’t validate - as Felgall says, every page that doesn’t validate runs the risk of some people not seeing it as you intended because their browser has a different error-handling mechanism to the one you’re using. There may be reasons why your page doesn’t validate (usually those reasons are ignorance, laziness or apathy), but there are no excuses for it not to validate.
What you may have seen is that sites that validate generally have better code - leaner code with less cruft and rubbish cluttering it up, better use of semantics - than sites where the author can’t be bothered with standards, and Google does prefer code than is clean, lean and semantic.
Google.com is not W3C Validated.
To speak to the SEO point. Although from a search engine point of view, in my experience, validation won’t gain you anything directly. Indirectly though writing valid code normally results in faster, cleaner code, which Google has said is a ranking factor. Page speed took affect early this year, so clunky invalid code could be having a minor impact.
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission
“The Web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now “meet on the Web” and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence. As more activity moves on-line, it will become even more important to support complex interactions among parties around the globe.”
“If you don’t understand the hidden costs associated with poor coding practices, you won’t realize the ROI of using valid code.” - http://www.seoconsultants.com/validation/#SEOPerspective
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/
Short answer: No.
If your page contains validation errors then your page will not display correctly in some browsers. Depending on what fraction of your potential audience use those browsers you will have fewer people able to use the site than if it were valid. That in turn will lead to fewer people linking to it and that will impact on SEO.
Of course your site may work in all the browsers of any significance without being valid so that the validation error may only cost you one visitor in a million so that it has no noticeable impact but why not get the page valid so that it works for everyone.
SEs can still crawl, index and rank your site… even if you don’t use any validation…
validation won’t gain you anything directly, but you should know the standards for WWW
If not mistaken, Google does like sites that are properly coded and have no errors. the W3C are the ones that set the coding standard. So getting validated by them is quite good.