W3C Compliance - Still a ranking factor in 2015?
-
Hi All,
In regards to W3C Compliance, is this still an important ranking factor? Has anyone become compliant and seen a noticeable difference in rankings?
Cheers,
-
Hi Jamie,
I was asked this question recently by a client and my response was that as long as your site can be crawled efficiently and read by Google having a w3c compliant site won't make a difference to rankings. I also pointed out to them that amazon.co.uk - has nearly 400 errors and over 100 warning when you run it through w3c validation tool but they do well in the SERPs!
-
lolol @ Google knows it.
Cheers Matt I get what you mean, I was thinking maybe Google had a green flag system letting it know the site is compliant and giving it a boost. Seems as though it's just guidelines after all.
Have a good one bud.
-
I agree with the other responses with a caveat. W3C compliance is not a ranking factor - except when it's a massive problem. If your site has 50 errors and 10 warnings, not a ranking factor. If you have 600 errors, it actually may affect your rankings - but I don't think it's "compliance" related as much as it is "your site sucks and Google knows it" related.
So a massive amount of errors may actually look like a ranking issue - but it's not a factor, I think.
-
Cheers Robert, I haven't seen any evidence online either but I thought it worth asking.
Have a good one
-
Hi Alick
Thanks for the info and video ill check it out now.
-
Jamie,
Years ago everyone put W3C compliant on every website they seemed to produce. I have never seen it have an impact in rankings and would be interested to see if anyone has any reasonable evidence it did. So, I have to agree with Alick300 and suggest you follow that moz guide as it is a really good basis for SEO and ranking.
Best
Robert
-
Hi Jamie,
Neither it was nor it is an important ranking factor. No I haven't seen any noticeable difference .
List of Important SEO ranking Factors @ http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
I'm also sharing Matt Cutts video on this @ http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2297152/does-google-penalize-for-invalid-html-matt-cutts-says-no
Thanks
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
-
Buying a domain to 301 redirect for increased rankings
A large competitor has recently purchased a large marketing company that specializes in their industry. As a part of this acquisition they obtained ownership of www.digitalsherpa.com, which is now 301 redirecting some 50K links to www.costar.com/. When I did a site:www.digitalsherpa.com search all of the origin URLs had title tags from the costar site in place of their own. My question is: Does this violate Google spam guidelines? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Adigitalsherpa.com&oq=site&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i65j69i60j0l2.1919j0j7
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
How to rank in Google Places
Normally, I don't have a problem with local SEO (more of a multi-channel sort of online marketing guy) but this one has got me scratching my head. Look at https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wedding+venues+in+essex Theres two websites there (fennes and quendon park) that both have a much more powerful DA but don't appear in the Google Places (Google + Business or whatever it's labeled as). Why are websites such as Boreham house ranking top in the map listings? Quendon Park has a Google places listing, it's full of content, the NAP all matches up. Its a stronger website. Boreham House isn't any closer to the centroid than Quendon Park Just got me struggling this one
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Page Rank gone - technical difficulty?
Hi all, after coming back from the holidays, I noticed that our PR (6 on the homepage) has vanished into "Unranked". All other sites are also "unranked". I tested other domains - PR still there, so the problem does not lie in the PR checker. There are no drops in traffic, rankings, no messages in the GWMT, the same numer of indexed pages, inbound links okay (all natural)... As you see, I checked everything I thought could be a hint to a solution, but found nothing... This goes on for the 3rd day now (after my holidays, maybe even longer). Could there be a technical problem causing this "drop"? Our website: http://www.access.de/ I am thankful for all hints/suggestions... Thanx...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Looking to rank a .co.uk domain in the USA
Hello Mozzers, One of my clients sites is "domain.co.uk" and they are looking to rank in the USA with the same domain. They are looking to change host (for unrelated reasons) and I think it may be beneficial for them to get hosting in the USA. Essentially the business is moving to the USA but they want to retain their domain name as they cannot get their hands on a domain with their company name in that is .com / .net / .org etc. . . I know that the .co.uk domain will adversely affect click through rates in the states, but there seems to be no way around this if they want their retain the company name as their domain name. Would American based hosting help them rank better for searches from the USA or is the benefit of this negligible? Net66
Technical SEO | | net660 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
How to Resolve Rankings Drop from a DDOS Attack?
Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board. There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved. Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last? How can we deal with this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign
The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting). The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month. The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages. Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions. My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings? I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either. If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated. Best, Carlton
Technical SEO | | csmithal1 -
Why Does this Site Rank for so Many Keywords?
I was doing some research today and kept coming across this site sylvane.com I checked OSE and found that it only has a DA of 37 PA of 35, and only 79 linking domains (966 links total). I got to looking and there are a few links like this http://lulala.us/twxoops/html/userinfo.php?uid=303 Anyway, accroding to SEMRush, this site ranks for over 6,000 keywords. I ran content on a couple of their high ranking pages and the content is not unique, at least not very unique on the pages I checked. What is so special about that site that google is giving it so much love? I am not trying to call them out, I just want to know what this site is doing to garner the favor of google when I have a site in the same niche with a higher DA, PA, linking domains, and social signals.
Technical SEO | | CharlesMontgomery0