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.
How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?
-
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!
-
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.
-
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 HTML code and css code errors if written poorly or outdated does not really matter for actual seo and rankings on thier own.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
-
I love him...
-
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.
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
-
Gallery maintenance and the effect on SEO
Basically we get a lot of users uploading photos as part of their review, but many photos aren't moderated into our pages and therefore are never displayed. Things like selfies rather than photos of the product or just random google images that are completely unrelated to our products or services. Is there any benefit in cleaning up the gallery since some images we don't use are just sat there in admin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
when a page loads, would it be quicker if we had less content in the gallery? With our SEO hat on.
or does it not matter since it's not loading that content (photos) anyway?0 -
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end0 -
AJAX requests and implication for SEO
Hi, I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face: When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page. We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
How to rank for a location/country without having a physical address in that location/country
How do I go about it if my physical address (office) is in Country A but I want to rank my website in Country B, C and D (without having an office or physical address in the countries B, C and D)? I am aware of people setting up virtual offices in other countries/cities and adding them to Google Places/Maps with toll free phone numbers, but I don't wish to do any of that. I know Google will catch up with this one day or the other and punish me hard for trying to play games with it. Is there a way rank a website in another country without actually having a physical location there? If yes, please guide me how to go about it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
SEO impact difference between a URL Rewrite and 301 redirect
Hi guys and girls! Just putting a new site live, we changed the URL from one thing to another and I created a 301 file redirecting the urls like for like. The developer installing it has created a different file with columns like: RewriteRule ^page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^/page/ http://www.site/page [R=301,L] What's the difference? The page redirects but is there a difference between the 301 redirect and this URL rewrite in terms of SEO and link value?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0