Malformed Code Will Rarely Degrade Your Ranking

The devil is in the details of the SEO scam, known as W3C Validation. The validation police never publicize what Web site operators really need to know about this issue.  There is never any uncertainty as to whether or not some type of undetected W3C Validation problem is screwing with your search engine rankings.

The vast majority of validation errors detected by doing a very time consuming W3C Validation check of a webpage wont affect your Web site ranking in the least. Neither do they have anything to do with crawlability issues.

Malformed Header Section Coding Are Problematic

The bad news is that there are a very tiny number of malformed HTML coding errors in the Header Section of your markup coding that can degrade your search ranking in Google for a given Web page by messing up the title and meta description tags. Which results in a totally botched snippet for the respective webpages in the SERPs.

The good news is that these types of validation problems are most likely to affect only Web sites using static webpages. Dynamically generated Web site are not at all likely to be experiencing these types of Header Section coding errors. And, if they do, one quick fix will automatically fix all of their webpages.  Furthermore, these types of errors are rare and easy to detect.  I have been coding webpages for close to a decade, and I have never once made this type of an error.

Google is totally aware of this problem and will point out a number of different markup coding problems in  their Google’s Webmasters Tools feature.

Diagnostics
Content analysis – See potential problems with site metadata, such as title and meta description information.

Obviously, if you  do not mess up your HTML coding you will never experience any problems. Probably the biggest source of coding problems for static Web sites would be the improper use of search and replace utilities.  Recklessly  make global changes on your Web site with a search and replace utility and you can easily butcher your HTML coding, if you are not careful.

There is always a price to be paid for making HTML coding mistakes. The question is whether or not wasting a great deal of your time on W3C Validation is going to offset the value of catching what should in most situations be a very low number of serious Header Section coding errors.

Problematic Coding Errors Are Easy To Detect

There are a number of simple checks that anybody can manually perform that will quickly catch these types of markup coding errors for each new static webpage added.

1. View either the Page or Source Code online. You should routinely be doing this anyway in order to check the uniqueness of all your title and meta description tags.
2. You could attempt to create a Bookmark or Favorite in your Web browser. Malformed coding errors will show up as a funny looking suggested title.
3. Check the text-only version of Google’s Cache online. When it does NOT display as it normally should be, that signals that something is rotten in Denmark.
4. How do your new webpages look in the Google’s SERPs? Pages with major problems will display a messed up snippet.
5. And, finally you could always stop W3C Validating your Web pages pass the Header Section of each webpage.

Google provides a text-only version of their Google cache copy which conclusiviely points out whether a given webpage is crawlable or not. And, exactly how Google sees the webpage in question. It is a tool provided by Google that all SEOs should be using.