A lot has been written about W3 Compliance being a ranking factor in search engine optimisation. Many major companies use it as a main area of their on-page techniques, but so many high ranked sites being almost killed by the validator, it does bring an interesting argument, especially when Ajax and some script heavy sites can give an awful lot of validation errors. Their are advantages to W3 (World wide web consortium) compliance - it gives a semantic professional edge to your site, it is to a standard that all web designers should follow, theoretically, it makes a search engine robot spider quicker if their are no discrepancies across multiple browsers.
You can also submit a standards compliant site to "compliant collections", one example is w3csites.com – also another fresh link in there!
Search Engine Marketing Ireland said on evolt.org that they had a massive increase in back links and traffic from the results of standards compliance, they also made a great comment - Correct compliance does not mean that the content is being served correctly.
Matt Cutts from Googles quality group recently stated that "normal people write codes with errors" and that over 40% of HTML pages have syntax errors", i would conclude from this that W3c validation is not in the Google algorithm - this could however change quickly, making coding harder than it has to be.
Personally, I have always tried to validate for my SEO clients. Its almost an expectation, If all web developers who create fresh sites keep within validation standards if can only improve the state of the internet.
In conclusion, semantic mark up does insure search engines are indexing your website correctly but a site that is not standards compliant can be indexed, a compliant site gives a professional outlook and if SE’s decide to add a validation algorithm your site is safe and it can be viewed across browsers.
Chris
Internet Marketing - Ultima media Group
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