Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
The W3C Markup Validation Service - Good, Bad or Impartial?
-
Hi guys,
it seems that now days it is almost impossible to achieve 0 (Zero) Errors when testing a site via (The W3C Markup Validation Service - https://validator.w3.org). With analytic codes, pixels and all kind of tracking and social media scripts gunning it seems to be an unachievable task.
My questions to you fellow SEO'rs out there are 2:
1. How important and to what degree of effort do you go when you technically review a site and make the decision as to what needs to be fixed and what you shouldn't bother with.
2. How do you argue your corner when explaining to your clients that its impossible to active 100% validation.
*As a note i will say that i mostly refer to Wordpress driven sites.
would love ot hear your take.
Daniel.
-
I am my own client, so I can be as picky as a want, and I take care of the details that I feel are important.
I pay close attention to how the site is responding and rendering when I pretend that I am a visitor. I pay even more attention when a customer or visitor writes to me with a complaint. In my opinion, if the site is working great then all is good.
W3C validation seems to be of jugular importance to W3C evangelists. They will tell you that you will burn in Hell if you don't achieve it with flying colors. People who want to sell you their services will point at any fault that can be detected.
Practical people have a different opinion. I try to be as practical as possible.
-
I agree with Andy,
I use it as a guidance tool on any website i build. It serves a purpose, to check things are understood how they should be by a predetermined standard. But like any other automated tool it compares to set requirements that cannot always be met and cannot identify and ok these exceptions.
As long as you understand the error its pointing out and why its pointing it out, and know that despite this the code is rendering correctly and all outcomes are working as expected then there is no problem.
From an SEO stand point, aslong as google see's your site how you want it too i think it is a very very minor factor. Hell all of google returns errors of some variety.
-
Hi Yiannis,
I tend to add these in as an advisory to my clients because for the most part, and unless I see something specific, the results have absolutely no effect on SEO. If they wish to act on them, it is for their developers to handle.
I don't argue my corner really - never had to. I just tell them like it is - the site is rendering fine in everything and with no issues, so fix errors if you have the time and resources.
As I said, unless I spot something that is an actual problem, then it tends to just get bypassed.
-Andy
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
-
Traffic goes down after migration from aws to Microsoft azure cloud service
After migration of web application from aws ec2 instance to Microsoft azure web App service, we observed that we lost our 50% traffic. Our site custom domain is ihealthmantra.com and azure web App has default domain azurewebsites.net . Azure WebApp service has drawback that default domain gets in picture after mapping to my custom domain .We have mapped azure webAPP host name to our custom domain as CNAME record in DNS Table . Now same site working with two domains i.e ihealthmantra.com as well ass azurewebsites.net . As we seen this issues we made 301 redirection from azure default domain to our custom domain, Still no change in traffic.Google is now showing external links from azurewebsites.net to healthmantra.com . We are totally confused now . We don't know what exactly affected to our search traffic . Please Help us.
Technical SEO | | DivyaDubey0 -
Date in permalinks. Bad?
Hello! I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site. I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change? Any suggestions you have would be appreciated. Thanks!!!
Technical SEO | | Rich-DC1 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JimLynch0 -
Exclude price in rich snippet markup
Our site has their prices hidden for non logged in users. Its a woocommerce built site and the rich snippet markups are added by woocommerce. I would like to remove the markup for the price becouse : 1, we would like our customers to register for prices. 2 i dont want to get penalties for not showing the same thing to visitors as to "google" .. Any help or thoughts on this one? Thanks / Jonas
Technical SEO | | knubbz0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?
Hi there I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains? Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2. It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using: www.website.com/category1 (for store 1) www.website.com/category2 (for store 2) The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing). I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store). So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set: store1.website.com store2.website.com This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank. Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo? Another option I was considering was: www.website.com (for store 1) store2.website.com (for store 2) store3.website.com (for store 3) www.website.com/blog (for blog) Can this work? Good or bad for seo? best regards
Technical SEO | | qgairsoft0 -
Are links in menus to external sites bad for SEO?
We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress. I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site. This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu. So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Use of + in url good or bad?
Hi, I am working on a SEO project for a client.
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Some of the urls have a + between the keyword.
like www.example.com/make+me+happy/ Is this good or bad for seo?
Or is it maybe better to use - ? Thanks!0