Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?

    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?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    4961
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • HashtagHustler
      HashtagHustler last edited by

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • LesleyPaone
        LesleyPaone @jlane9 last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • jlane9
          jlane9 last edited by

          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

          LesleyPaone 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • HashtagHustler
            HashtagHustler last edited by

            I love him...

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • LesleyPaone
              LesleyPaone last edited by

              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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • viatrading1

                Merging Pages and SEO

                Hi, We are redesigning our website the following way: Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
                e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
                Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
                e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the other So we are merging multiples pages into one.
                What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible) e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
                Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change? Thank you,

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
                0
              • lzhao

                Would you rate-control Googlebot? How much crawling is too much crawling?

                One of our sites is very large - over 500M pages.   Google has indexed 1/8th of the site - and they tend to crawl between 800k and 1M pages per day. A few times a year, Google will significantly increase their crawl rate - overnight hitting 2M pages per day or more.  This creates big problems for us, because at 1M pages per day Google is consuming 70% of our API capacity, and the API overall is at 90% capacity.   At 2M pages per day, 20% of our page requests are 500 errors. I've lobbied for an investment / overhaul of the API configuration to allow for more Google  bandwidth without compromising user experience.   My tech team counters that it's a wasted investment - as Google will crawl to our capacity whatever that capacity is. Questions to Enterprise SEOs: *Is there any validity to the tech team's claim?  I thought Google's crawl rate was based on a combination of PageRank and the frequency of page updates.   This indicates there is some upper limit - which we perhaps haven't reached - but which would stabilize once reached. *We've asked Google to rate-limit our crawl rate in the past.   Is that harmful?  I've always looked at a robust crawl rate as a good problem to have. Is 1.5M Googlebot API calls a day desirable, or something any reasonable Enterprise SEO would seek to throttle back? *What about setting a longer refresh rate in the sitemaps?   Would that reduce the daily crawl demand?  We could set increase it to a month, but at 500M pages Google could still have a ball at the 2M pages/day rate. Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhao
                0
              • RickyShockley

                Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes

                Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into! I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings. Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley
                1
              • lighttable

                How much impact do Youtube transcripts have?

                We're considering transcribing our videos. It's a significant enough expense that we have to be sure of the impact. 1. How much effect do the transcripts have on Youtube SEO rankings? 2. Should we also post the transcripts beneath the video, or is uploading them sufficient? If we didn't post the transcripts, we'd just write custom keyword rich text for each video. We could post both keyword text and transcript text, but that may be too wordy. Does anyone have experience on how much Youtube transcripts impact rankings? Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable
                0
              • kashyaplakkad

                What should I cover in a SEO proposal ?

                What should I cover in a SEO proposal? Is there any sample SEO Proposal template in SEOMoz?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kashyaplakkad
                1
              • James77

                Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc

                I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
                /aclk   - No cd value
                /search - No cd value
                /url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
                0
              • Peter264

                Does font size affect SEO?

                In the eyes of Google, would the font text size of say a news article affect SEO?  For example, a slightly larger font being easier to read by those with bad eyes?  Accessibility?  If so, what size would be ideal? 10, 12, 14? Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
                0
              • IKT

                SEO from Godaddy How Good is it?

                http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx?ci=44163 it said "Includes Standard Search Engine Visibility to Improve Search Rankings" it begs for question... Search Engine Visibility??? Improve SERP?!?!!? is it really that good? O.o; or have i successfully been eaten my promotional messages? Can anyone with experience with them share some information with me ? 🙂 (The price tag is mighty interesting)

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.