Does W3 validating code help SEO

Hi all,

I just wanted to present this question to all you SEO savvy people out there. I have recently been building websites with W3 compliant code as an added SEO feature. Do you think that it helps with SEO and if so, do you know if there are any statistics out there on the web that show how much it helps?

Being W3C compliant doesn't inherently help SEO, i.e. there's no W3C compliant boost, but it does mean that visitors and SE spiders will be able to properly view and crawl your site, so it is definitely useful.

Almost spot on. I would suggest however, that given how capable search engines are at crawling and extracting the information from even the most badly coded site, there will be no benefit there either.

W3C validation has a place, but it should not be considered part of SEO.

There is no ranking benefit in W3C - that's a given... but IMHO any SEO that can develop their services with W3C in mind will beat any SEO that doesn't.

Why do aircraft pilot learn aerodynamics?

Surely to be a "good pilot" all you need to do is learn all the controls.

The underlining principles of SEO are found in the standards adopted by the World Wide Web.

The "standard" reduces a "search engine" down to its most basic component... it is a user-agent of the WWW... while Google itself using proprietary to order it's results it core functionality is the same as any other user-agent...

You can't play on the WWW without being able to integrate with it... as such Google must toe the W3C line so the world can access its proprietary order.

So all pilots are better pilots when they know and understand areodynamics and all SEOs become better SEOs if they follow the standard of the web.

differently... anyone that knows W3C is a really good SEO whether they tote that as a service or not.

I can see where you're coming from with the analogy, but I would differ on a couple of points.

Yes, I agree with your statement that Googlebot is a user-agent of the WWW, and as such any site built with the aim of being crawled should be built upon the fundamental basics of web protocols.

Where the analogy falls down IMHO is the suggestion that W3C standards is to an SEO what aerodynamics is to a pilot. A pilot's use of the aircraft controls is based upon what impact those controls have on the aircraft parts and the way they affect its aerodynamics. For an SEO, the controls become those factors that affect the website's impact on Google's algorithm, allowing the SEO to "fly" the website through the SERPs if you will.

For an aircraft, it is the job of the aircraft designer to ensure that it is first of all capable of flying, in the same way that it is the job of the website developer to ensure that the website is capable of being read by browsers and other user-agents.

A pilot should, of course, have a reasonable understanding of the basic mechanical principals that underlay the aircraft's ability to function, in the same way that an SEO should have at least a reasonable understanding of the basic building blocks and markup of a website that allow it to be seen. It is not, however, a prerequisite that the pilot should understand the finer rules governing the manufacture of individual parts, in the same way that it's not a prerequisite that the SEO should understand the finer rules and detail that permit the website to pass W3C validation.

As with most things in life, the greater the depth of knowledge a person has about a subject, the more rounded an individual they become. I would always encourage someone involved in the development and growth of a website to expand their knowledge of website development, be this W3C validation, back-end programming, design, etc. That way they have a better understanding of the potential, and correspondingly, the limits of a site.

Does knowing the W3C rules make for a better SEO? Probably -- not because the W3C rules have a direct impact on their SEO efforts, but because they have a more rounded understanding of how a website works and how Google looks at the site. In the same way that an SEO who understands php would be better than one who didn't because that SEO would know whether or not any changes could be integrated into the existing server-side code, and not because the php code directly affects Google.

Ultimately we come to the same conclusion, just via a different route.