Old school HTML and rankings
-
How does really old school HTML (with inline CSS and a boat load of markup errors) affect modern SEO?
I'm talking purely rankings, not conversions or bounce rate etc.
-
Yes, the problem is that it is not flat HTML.
I think that the site was originally a flat HTML site, with inline CSS (and JavaScript on page) that was added into a CMS (which isn't the best CMS for SEO, in my opinion).
Personally, I think flat HTML (coded in modern markup) sites are better to work with on the small scale due to the amount of flexibility they offer. Actual HTML sites are not my real issue, my issue is the unclean code.
It is way beyond current standards, there are bits of Java in there that don't do anything and the code is very long for the size of the page and the amount of content on there.
My question basically is, would two sites with identical content (ignoring the issue of duplication for the purposes of this hypothetical), rank differently if one had new, clean and error free code and one was the original with the errors and the out of date code?
-
All websites render in HTML and CSS, regardless of what they are programmed in!
In terms of site structure, it may be easier to have issues with Canonical URLs, broken links, missing redirects etc, as these sites are unlikely to have any form of Content Management Systems.
Be careful with inline CSS and Scripts, as these can dilute your actual meaningful markup in your files and give a bad content:code ratio.
In reality, there is no reason that a completely flat HTML website could not rank number 1 for the most competitive term in your niche
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
-
Website Redesign & Ensuring Minimal Traffic/Rankings Lost
Hi there, We have undergone a website redesign (mycompany.com) and our site is ready to go live however the new website is built on a different platform so all of our blog pages will not be copied over - to avoid a large web developer expense. So our intention is to then leave all the blog pages as (on the old web design) but move it to the domain blog.mycompany.com with 301 redirects inserted on mycompany.com for each blog post pointing to the corresponding blog.mycompany.com. Is there anything else we should do to ensure minimal traffic/rankings are lost? Thank you so much for your help.
Web Design | | amitbroide0 -
Which one is better for ranking?
Hello community My question is most of the domains on the first page has non-WWW URL thereby If I consider High domain authoritative sites including https://moz.com/ and https://ahrefs.com/ : the site URL is without www on the contrary, when I take Google it has https://www.google.co.in/ It just confused me, could anyone solve my issue that which one is better for SEO?
Web Design | | Tabassum0 -
Flickr Gallery Effect on Page Ranking
Hello there We are working on a redesign for our site, and our business is very image intensive (sign company) On a typical product page, we have 5 images we are placing directly in the site optimized to try to rank the images in image search We also have about 30-50 sets of images, with 3-5 images each - hosted on flickr, that we are displaying as galleries on the page (user clicks, opens a light box to view the set, etc) Here is the page - http://impactsigns.ugmade.com/sample-page/ If you look at the page code, you will see that the flickr gallery (additional examples) section - adds ALOT of code to the page (lines 498 to 837) My question is : Does adding that flick gallery block negatively impact the page SEO, all else being equal? It seems like a lot of lines of code. And dont want it to seem spammy to the search engines. Thanks for your help and advice
Web Design | | Jumman0 -
Google HTML, CSS and javascript styleguides ?
Who's following the Google style guides especially in HTML, CSS and javascript? What are the benefits of following the style guides? I am thinking of sending the style guides to our web development team before we launch our new site but I think there might be some conflicts. I'm an SEO and not programmer or web developer and I'm sure there are some "rules" that these web dev guys should follow and break as well. Thanks in advance! 🙂
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
New site or fix the old one
I have a delima. Basically the main business product I used to offer is not going to be offered anymore. The types of sales events we conducted for auto dealerships are not able to be insured any longer forcing the change. So I am pivoting to just offering direct mail and I plan on going into digital probably social, landing pages, content marketing and not sure what else. I was able to register http:www.roiautos.com and www.roidirectmail.com both variations of www.roiautosolutions.com withc was the original site. Also that is the closest to the actual name of the business. My question is whether to build a site focusing on direct mail using the direct mail dot com, or just to redo the current site. The current site doesn't have much rank if any because the old product was not something that was searched for. As a mater of fact 99% of my business came from referrals and word or mouth so I just never really bothered. My thoughts are that ROI Direct Mail will work better for search and I am even going to use that as a DBA and TM. But I am unsure of what to do for search. One thing that has to happen is that all references to offering staffed sales events have to be removed from any site per my insurance company. Any advice?
Web Design | | roiautos0 -
Rankings Tanked After Redesign
This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience. Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure. Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms. I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible. Now I have no idea where to even begin. Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%! Any insight is very, very much appreciated.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10