How much impact does bad html coding really have on SEO?
-
My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad.
There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords>
How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore.
I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule.
Should it all be cleaned up?
Many thanks
-
Hi Chammy,
I inherited a site that reported 3,184 crawl errors in MOZ and a significant number of them (nearly 600) were duplicate titles and content. I have that down to under 1,000 total errors and only 86 critical errors. I have seen my ranking grow pretty substantially and in one week had 6 pages increase over 20 positions in rank. I can share the MOZ Rank Report if you would like to see it.
So yes, it does have an impact.
-
I'm sorry, I don't have any evidence from the user experience point of view,. although I would also be interested to see the results of any studies.
I will say that from a site management/maintenance point of view it makes sense to try and keep the code as clean as possible. I've been involved in project were a considerable chunk of the cost was incurred due to the amount of time and effort that was required to unravel the mess even before any new changes were made!
-
Thanks very much everyone - very helpful.
Good point re page speed - the pages are certainly slow to load so this could well be due to the huge amount of js and bad code.
And yes, think the duplicate tags should be sorted - this shouldn't be difficult.
Has anyone got any tangible results that they've seen as a result of cleaning up js and code?
-
If you've got things like duplicate title and meta-description's going on then I'd certainly take a look at fixing those. Being able to manage these two tags is vital to managing the way your pages will appear in the search results. (And your title tag is an important ranking factor).
Normally, if your page doesn't validate then it's not a major problem and search engines won't penalise you for it. If however, your page is so badly crafted that the html errors, and general page structure makes it difficult for the search engines (and humans) to read your page then you're going to suffer.
The key is to make sure that your site/page content is accessible. How accessible is your page to someone with disabilities, using a screen reader etc.
You've got to make sure that the search engines can understand what your page is about or your page won't be seen as a relevant page for any search terms...
How bad is it? How does google render the page in it's instant previews (you can check this is Google Webmaster tools)
-
I personally don't worry about bad code unless it slows down my page or can possibly make things confusing for search engines or readers.
If the title and meta are appearing twice this could be confusing for search engines, so I would change this. But, if you've got things like an unclosed
here and there I personally don't think that's going to be much of a factor.
-
Invalid code has a small effect on ranking. However, if the invalid code causes usability issues such as load time and or causes a high bounce rate then it can lower your rankings and of course cut back on conversions.
Some of it is a higher priority than others. I would say defo remove the meta keywords.
Combine JS pages. The tables while out of date is not a big issue.
If you have the time and resources then yes it should be cleaned up. If not then clean up major problems
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
-
Will redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
How can i do SEO For Ecommerce site
I am doing SEO for my WP blog but now I am starting my recently launch an eCommerce site where I am selling electronics products. I want to know how can I do the SEO so at least I can top 10 position for my google India. Second how can i avoid duplicate content about copying manufacture contents. Please help
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
E Tags and SEO relevance
While working through a number of issues related to the speed of my site I came across a discussion of E Tags. I did not read much positive about them. How do they affect SEO? Or do they?
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Is it bad to have same templates for all of my EMDs
I have been working on EMDs and they are more than 40 EMDs. All 2 KW EMDs with DA around 35 Now they all have same templates. Can it be a problem in future ? (though they don't have similar content)
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Help with this metadata code!
My website developer used the code below for my metadata but SEomoz is showing an error for my metadata. How can I change with this code so it will work?
Technical SEO | | CapitolShine0 -
Does server location impact SEO?
Hi, I am about to purchase hosting for my WordPress site which is primarily targeting the UK and wondered if server location still has an impact on SEO? Also can anyone recommend a reliable hosting provider with CPanel?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
What is SEO impact of redirecting from domain to https appspot domain ?
Our site is hosted on google and is fully https. But since google's limitation is that all https needs to be on the appspot domain, we are redirecting users from our website to the appspot domain. What is the impact of this on SEO?
Technical SEO | | incandescent0 -
Does HTTPS Only make a impact on SEO?
Hi. I run a site that's SSL only. (Using a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from http:// to https://). This might be a stupid question but i can't seem to find any conclusive answers to the question by searching. Does this negatively affect the search engine ranking of the site? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Host1
Eivind1