Is HTML validation required for search engine ranking? (Video)
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Is HTML validation required for search engine ranking? (Video)
| Jimmy asks, "Hi Matt. |
| In a previous video, you stated that validation of HTML |
| wasn't really important for ranking or SEO. |
| This confuses me. |
| Wouldn't Google really want to send its users to websites |
| which would be broken for a lot of them?" Danny, how would |
| you answer that? |
| DANNY: Well, a lot of websites can have invalid code but |
| actually render just fine, because a lot of modern |
| browsers do a good job dealing with bad code. |
| And so, it's not so much that the code has to be absolutely |
| perfect, but whether or not the page is going to render |
| well for the user in general. |
| So it makes sense to still list these websites; it makes |
| sense not to be that specific. |
| And plus, people make a lot of mistakes because they're using |
| different HTML editors, or maybe they're |
| doing some hand coding. |
| They're little tiny things that aren't going to have that |
| big of an impact. |
| If you were trying to be very very specific, I suspect-- and |
| Google would certainly know-- but you'd have a lot of |
| websites that would be left out for no good reason because |
| they would still be validating just perfectly fine. |
| MATT: In valedectori. |
| You were even joking a little bit about this. |
| DANNY: I did. |
| So, for example, in this question, there's a |
| grammatical error that's in it, and I can understand what |
| the question is about perfectly well. |
| But if I were going to invalidate even taking |
| questions based on them being perfectly grammatically |
| correct, then it would be lost. In that case, if you |
| will, Google can both understand and deal with pages |
| that are perfectly grammatically correct, and |
| perfectly HTML correct, and it can also understand when |
| you're being a little more casual. |
| Because basically it understands |
| what the page is about. |
| MATT: So, Danny nailed that. |
| I don't really have much to add, other than usually if a |
| page doesn't validate, it still can look perfectly fine |
| in the browsers, which is exactly what you said at the |
| very beginning. |
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