well...then again (this is the programmer in me speaking!) you could always "force" submission compliance by building in scripting to ensure that ALL those items are completed by the submitter themselves - else the SUBMIT button remains grayed out....

would work. have built them myself. you could eLance or oDesk it too....

What Egol said is quite true...this has been debated for years....but those of us who don't care about the validations rank our own or our clients sites quite nicely.

Oh sidebar - you'd be so surprised to learn what kind of HUGE well known sites won't validate either....

Yeah...as others have noted, there often is the live link somewhere else that points to a page that is now gone...

So a 404 really is the LINK page....as long as it's out there, it'll point to that non-existant page....so a 301 can help, or (this was fun) you can 301 the incoming 404 link BACK to the linking page itself....

teeHee...yeah, not such a good idea but a tactic that we did have to use about 4 years ago to get a spam directory to "buzz off!!!"

adamxj2 re: "... having too many at once can negatively affect your rankings...."

???

on what testing do you quote that? As my own SEO world includes no such assumptions or proof of same!

WHAT a 404 will affect is conversions...no one who shows up on a site after taking a link into same and finding a 404 will ever get a feeling other than if a site can't fix it's 404's then why would I belive they can sell me something etc.

404's do NOT affect rankings....they disappear on their own it's true...but I always fix same asap!

Hmm...never seen this exactly before - but a few years back we discovered for a client that their reality tv series show (Deadliest Catch) member site had been severely infected by Canadian Pharma phony sites....

Seems the hacker had 'broken' in via a MS update that was not done on their hosting platform site - and it took the tv company almost 4 months to disavow, rebuild and then index and begin to rank again as I remember....i.e. this was NOT a WP issue but a hosting server hack...

But with 20+ pages of Uggs and Nude Men rolling Christians (love that one, eh!) infections, you need to get that totally fixed asap so I'd start with querying the hosting vendor logs...

How comes to mind...if you can not determine where the hack came from - you could kill the subdomain after saving all your articles - recreate it say as "info.mshowells.com" or "advice.mshowells.com" or "counsel.mshowells.com" and reload in the same artices....have had to do that too for another client....