How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

I have been trying to clean up this website and  half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me.

I found this post on Moz from last year:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo

We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed.

I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly.

Thanks everybody!

[LesleyPaone]

Invalid code does not equate to slow code. Google used to purposely not close html and body tags to save bandwidth and loading time. I took the question as meaning w3c valid code.

[jlane9]

Bad code can definately affect seo rankings for a website.

The question really depends on what exactly is wrong with the code. If its causing problems with page load speed times, that could be a problem for sure. HTML code and css code errors if written poorly or outdated does not really matter for actual seo and rankings on thier own. Unless these erros are causing other issues such as user experience which would increase bounce rates and affect rankings. If the code errors are causing duplicate pages., Html errors like missing H1, tags and such can affect on page seo scores which affect rankings. So in my honest opinion bad code can definately affect seo rankings for a website.

Free page speed test with results breakdown can be had there => http://www.webpagetest.org

Definately clean up all the HTML seo factors, usuability issues and page speed issues.  Hope that helps, Have a great day, Joe

[HashtagHustler]

I love him...

[LesleyPaone]

As long as links are not broken and resources are not returning 404 errors, my understanding is that it is not affected at all. The only thing I would make sure of is that fetch as google returns the page looking like it should. Here is a video from the authority on the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3KgrbiB1pc#t=52