The Honest Truth is that Validation is Pure Bunk
The Honest Truth is that if somebody comments that your website is a coding nightmare. And, asks: Is it any wonder that you are having problems? They are nothing but a SEO scam artist trying to take advantage of your naivety.
Another tip off is when they tell you that:
“[Your website] is based upon pre-1999 design practices which means it is eight years out-of-date.”
I have been there, and have had that happen to me on numerous occasions.
First of all, the need for W3C Validation is total nonsense on many different levels. Validation has some benefits, such as a way of fixing display bugs. But, in no way does sloppy coding prevent your site from ranking well in the SERPs. Google has said so itself.
Every website has a display design. Some designs are in fact horribly bad from a SEO point of view. But, a good SEO website design no matter how old it may or may not be certainly wont prevent your site from ruling the SERPs.
All of the advice of any SEO who offers these types of comments should be called into question.
For the honest truth is that they are just trolls trying to scam you into spending your time making worthless busywork changes to your website. Or, worst yet trying to scam you into purchasing their expensive SEO services.
- Link Juice is Total Bunk!
- Malformed Code Will Rarely Degrade Your Ranking
- Pagerank Is About Counting Links
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June 7, 2008 at 4:41 am
I must respectfully disagree.
While SEO is important, so is the useability of a site. Poorly written bloated code takes longer to load and makes additional changes to the site increasingly risky. This shows no respect for your reader.
Moreover, the internet is a shared resource. Each spam email, each redundant line of code, each IE kludge, slows the internet down a tad. Given the volume of pages, emails and so on that are served each hour, the extra bytes add up pretty quickly.
June 7, 2008 at 7:47 am
There is a lot of misinformation being circulated out on the web, with the so-called importance of W3C Validation being one of them.
A lot of things will slow down the loading of webpages. Dynamically created websites, like WordPress, load slower than static sites. Yet, I do not see any movement to band WordPress from the Web due to its slow loading pages.
Personally, I use dial-up. So, I am acutely aware of S-L-O-W and how somethings just tend to drag on.
Faster computers and Web Connections do in fact effectively make up for many failings of webpage coding.
June 22, 2008 at 8:11 am
I personally run a natural health website that uses a 1990’s design that has been criticized by a lot of people for being out of date.
That home page of mine has ranked in the top ten for years, and has been as high as #5 in a field of 17 million webpages.
I have received so many criticisms of it that my home page and page template does in fact W3C Validate, yet my webpages on that website have still been attacked for its non-validating code by the SEO trolls on Google’s Webmaster Help group.