Social button yes or social button no...

[jobintourism]

Hi everybody!

It's quite clear that if you have a pretty, clean, compact html code on your website, Google loves you as a lovely mom does with her kids.

But it's not a dream world and you have actually to choose between social and clean code.

In fact to add, for example, the Facebook social button, you have to include some files from the Facebook servers. Even though the googlebot doesn't download them (but people do, with page optimization decreasing), it reads some javascript code. Moreover you have to add some code where you want the button appears.

I think it hasn't much sense for the googlebot, so that could it be punitive for your website / page to place that bunch of code?

In the end my question is the following:

Does the social power win against negative factors like additional files to download and a bunch of ugly code in your body?

social power > bad factors (file downloading+more code)?

[jobintourism]

Thanks for your reply Jamie.

I think there's not only black and white in code writing. Theoretically you have to produce perfect html/xhtml W3C standards compliant code but you also have to face many changes in standards, the needs of your website, cost ties, velocity issues etc. For example, if you try to validate the piece of code I placed upon, using xhtml 1.1 standard, the w3c website will warn you because you can't use not supported attributes.

It's clear: Google doesn't need to follow standards, beacuse Google makes the standard, but what really Google thinks about my site without Facebook buttons is the same as it would think with them?  For example if I insert the following piece of code which is a  tag that describes the entity your page represents, what's the googlebot's impression?

In the end also a visitor will perceive the difference, if he will have to wait additional secs, waiting for the file download, especially if he uses an old single download channel browser.

I don't know if the sum of all theese issues exceedes the advantages. Does someone has some evidence about it?

[jenmcardle]

Hello,

How do you measure "clean, compact code"? As far as I am aware the primary measurement is code validation as per W3C standards (http://validator.w3.org). I checked the line of code you shared and it is valid HTML5 code.

Google has the ability to crawl invalid code as well. There are millions of sites and many of them use invalid code, including Google.com. I always recommend using valid code but just because code is invalid does not mean Google will have any problem crawling or indexing your site. Each error needs to be evaluated.

In the case above, there does not seem to be any problem with the code so I do not see any concern in using it. Aside from code optimization, I would still use it. Social media has been shown to offer a greater traffic boost then any other factor. It's a must for your website.