How much impact does bad html coding really have on SEO?
-
My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad.
There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords>
How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore.
I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule.
Should it all be cleaned up?
Many thanks
-
Hi Chammy,
I inherited a site that reported 3,184 crawl errors in MOZ and a significant number of them (nearly 600) were duplicate titles and content. I have that down to under 1,000 total errors and only 86 critical errors. I have seen my ranking grow pretty substantially and in one week had 6 pages increase over 20 positions in rank. I can share the MOZ Rank Report if you would like to see it.
So yes, it does have an impact.
-
I'm sorry, I don't have any evidence from the user experience point of view,. although I would also be interested to see the results of any studies.
I will say that from a site management/maintenance point of view it makes sense to try and keep the code as clean as possible. I've been involved in project were a considerable chunk of the cost was incurred due to the amount of time and effort that was required to unravel the mess even before any new changes were made!
-
Thanks very much everyone - very helpful.
Good point re page speed - the pages are certainly slow to load so this could well be due to the huge amount of js and bad code.
And yes, think the duplicate tags should be sorted - this shouldn't be difficult.
Has anyone got any tangible results that they've seen as a result of cleaning up js and code?
-
If you've got things like duplicate title and meta-description's going on then I'd certainly take a look at fixing those. Being able to manage these two tags is vital to managing the way your pages will appear in the search results. (And your title tag is an important ranking factor).
Normally, if your page doesn't validate then it's not a major problem and search engines won't penalise you for it. If however, your page is so badly crafted that the html errors, and general page structure makes it difficult for the search engines (and humans) to read your page then you're going to suffer.
The key is to make sure that your site/page content is accessible. How accessible is your page to someone with disabilities, using a screen reader etc.
You've got to make sure that the search engines can understand what your page is about or your page won't be seen as a relevant page for any search terms...
How bad is it? How does google render the page in it's instant previews (you can check this is Google Webmaster tools)
-
I personally don't worry about bad code unless it slows down my page or can possibly make things confusing for search engines or readers.
If the title and meta are appearing twice this could be confusing for search engines, so I would change this. But, if you've got things like an unclosed
here and there I personally don't think that's going to be much of a factor.
-
Invalid code has a small effect on ranking. However, if the invalid code causes usability issues such as load time and or causes a high bounce rate then it can lower your rankings and of course cut back on conversions.
Some of it is a higher priority than others. I would say defo remove the meta keywords.
Combine JS pages. The tables while out of date is not a big issue.
If you have the time and resources then yes it should be cleaned up. If not then clean up major problems
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Handling Pages with query codes
In Moz my client's site is getting loads of error messages for no follow tags on pages. This is down to the query codes on the E-commerce site so the URLs can look like this https://www.lovebombcushions.co.uk/?bskt=31d49bd1-c21a-4efa-a9d6-08322bf195af Clearly I just want the URL before the ? to be crawled but what can I do in the site to ensure that these errors for nofollow are removed? Is there something I should do in the site to fix this? In the back of my mind I'm thinking rel-conanical tag but I'm not sure. Can you help please?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist1 -
Pop-ups ok for SEO?
Are unintrusive pop-ups okay or is Google likely to impose a black mark? I'm not talking about making people stay on the site, just talking about little one corner pop-up for a special offer. An example would be an embedded live chat pop-up. Have you had any experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Duplicate page content - index.html
Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
Technical SEO | | Collie
www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?0 -
If a permanent redirect is supposed to transfer SEO from the old page to the new page, why has my domain authority been impacted?
For example, we redirected our old domain to a new one (leaving no duplicate content on the old domain) and saw a 40% decrease in domain authority. Isn't a permanent redirect supposed to transfer link authority to the place it is redirecting to? Did I do something wrong?
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
How much will changing IP addresses impact SEO?
So my company is upgrading its Internet bandwidth. However, apparently the vendor has said that part of the upgrade will involve changing our IP address. I've found two links that indicate some care needs to be taken to make sure our SEO isn't harmed: http://followmattcutts.com/2011/07/21/protect-your-seo-when-changing-ip-address-and-server/ http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/275513-changing-ip-affect-seo.html Assuming we don't use an IP address that has been blacklisted by Google for spamming or other black hat tactics, how problematic is it? (Note: The site hasn't really been aggressively optimized yet - I started with the company less than two weeks ago, and just barely got FTP and CMS access yesterday - so honestly I'm not too worried about really messing up the site's optimization, since there isn't a lot to really break.)
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
Bit.ly URLs. Are they SEO Friendly?
Are URL shorteners like Bit.ly considered 301 redirects? I was thinking about using them for some longer URL's in press releases but i didn't want to loose any link juice through the service. Thanks for the info! - Kyle
Technical SEO | | kchandler0 -
Converse.com - flash and html version of site... bad idea?
I have a questions regarding Converse.com. I realize this ecommerce site is needs a lot of seo help. There’s plenty of obvious low hanging seo fruit. On a high level, I see a very large SEO issue with the site architecture. The site is a full page flash experience that uses a # in the URL. The search engines pretty much see every flash page as the home page. To help with issue a HTML version of the site was created. Google crawls the Home Page - Converse.com http://www.converse.com Marimekko category page (flash version) http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko Marimekko category page (html version, need to have flash disabled) http://www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko Here is the example of the issue. This site has a great post featuring Helen Marimekko shoes http://www.coolmompicks.com/2011/03/finnish_foot_prints.php The post links to the flash Marimekko catagory page (http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko) as I would expect (ninety something percent of visitors to converse.com have the required flash plug in). So the flash page is getting the link back juice. But the flash page is invisible to google. When I search for “converse marimekko” in google, the marimekko landing page is not in the top 500 results. So I then searched for “converse.com marimekko” and see the HTML version of the landing page listed as the 4<sup>th</sup> organic result. The result has the html version of the page. When I click the link I get redirected to the flash Marimekko category page but if I do not have flash I go to the html category page. ----- Marimekko - Converse All Star Marimekko Price: $85, Jack Purcell Helen Marimekko Price: $75 ... www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko - Cached So my issues are… Is converse skating on thin SEO ice by having a HTML and flash version of their site/product pages? Do you think it’s a huge drag on seo rankings to have a large % of back links linking to flash pages when google is crawling the html pages? Any recommendations on to what to do about this? Thanks, SEOsurfer
Technical SEO | | seosurfer-2883190 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1