When I was in school, I learned that having my websites’ code be 100% W3C standards compliant wasn’t just something to brag about, it was something to be ashamed of failing at. It’s an attitude that I’ve maintained while working at Longevity Graphics, which has lead to some pretty frustrating days. Some of our clients’ sites use CMS’s such as WordPress, Drupal, or Perch that have their own code structure that is not compliant with W3C standards. Even social media applications such as the Facebook ‘like’ button and Google Plus buttons don’t validate!
It got me wondering whether validation is truly crucial. Specifically, I wondered how important W3C validation is for SEO. I did some research, and while I found some contrasting views, W3C validation does not seem to be an important factor for SEO – with some caveats.
Out of curiosity, I used the W3C validator to check Google’s home page for errors. The result was 34 errors and 3 warnings. It shouldn’t be surprising, however, as Matt Cutts himself has said explicitly that W3C validation does not offer a ‘boost’ to the ranking of any site (see Matt Cutts’ explanation here). If you don’t want to watch the video, I can paraphrase: Google cares more about loading times, browser compatibility, usability, and content than validation for the sake of validation. This should be enough to end any debate, but there are a few things to bear in mind even if 100% W3C validation is not a factor in itself for SEO.
The first thing to remember is that many of the factors that W3C validation is based on are also important to SEO. For instance, the use of alt tags on images is mandatory for validation and it’s also important to use relevant keywords in alt tags for SEO. So while W3C validation is not directly beneficial to SEO, there are a lot of overlapping standards. Having clean code should also help to increase load time, which is a ranking factor for Google. Improving load time will enhance the crawlability of the site (especially important for large, deep sites such as online stores with dozens or hundreds of product pages). Smaller files and cleaner code will help you to reduce the fatigue of search engines while crawling your site, so they will be less likely to time out and not index deeply nested pages.
The bottom line is that the W3C validation points out a lot of issues that, when fixed, help to keep the code clean and easier for crawlers to index. A couple of validation errors on a page is not the end of the world. However, we should take as many steps as possible to increase the crawlability of the site to ensure that all content is being indexed.
Have you noticed your site’s rankings drop considerably in the last few weeks? It might have been a result of Google’s latest search engine update, Penguin.
Launched on April 24th, Google Penguin is entirely about promoting white-hat practices and upholding the standards of Google’s quality guidelines, and has little to do with directly improving search results. The Penguin update has been specifically designed to penalize and de-rank sites that have boosted ranking through grey-hat means. What is grey-hat, you ask?
Simply speaking, grey-hat techniques are any SEO techniques that are intended to boost ranking for a site without regard for user experience. These techniques include keyword stuffing and link schemes, which have been all too common in the past. If you’ve had your site’s ranking fall drastically as a result of Penguin, chances are high that you or your SEO person used one of these techniques.
According to Matt Cutts, the Penguin update is intended to reward those sites that have made use of white-hat SEO techniques. White-hat SEO is complicit with Google’s quality guidelines and includes doing things such as making sites load faster, writing informative and unique content, and improving usability. These are judged to be white-hat because they benefit the user as well as the search engines; they focus on building the quality of the site rather than on boosting its rankings.
The bottom line is, grey-hat techniques will not get you results as they once did – they will, in fact, be harmful to your rankings if implemented. Thankfully, there are SEO specialists like Longevity Graphics who hold fast to Google’s quality guidelines and pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. The Penguin update is about promoting quality on the web, and that’s something we have always believed in.
Embedding WordPress RSS Feeds on an .ASP Website should be simple, RIGHT?
That’s what I thought too. I searched through WordPress forums, Google SERP’s, Webmaster Forums, Feed readers/burners software… No luck!
It is simple it you are working in PHP but ASP is a little more difficult. I found a bunch of javascript scripts but that completely defeats the SEO value of the blog feeds.
I came across this resource that made it super simple and wanted to share this in case anyone else runs into this same issue:
Worked like a charm and easy to implement. Hope this helps someone else.
Lindsay Viscount
Owner/Creative Director
www.LongevityGraphics.com
What is Google PageRank?
PageRank is the algorithm used by the Google search engine. It is based on the premise, prevalent in the world of academia, that the importance of a research paper can be judged by the number of citations the paper has from other research papers. Google has simply transferred this premise to its web equivalent: the importance of a web page can be judged by the number of hyperlinks pointing to it from other web pages.
What affects Page Rank?
Simply put, the PageRank of a web page is therefore calculated as a sum of the PageRanks of all pages linking to it (its incoming links), divided by the number of links on each of those pages (its outgoing links).
Is Page Rank important?
It is a common belief that page rank isn’t important anymore. I, however, find it hard to believe that Google would assign a page rank system that isn’t used for something. It is true that websites with low page rank can rank high with in the search results pages for targeted keywords. There are many different algorithms at play to determine this.
So what is page rank for and how can we leverage it?
Generally, page rank of a website can be used as a starting point to determine where it is at in regards to domain authority. Where page rank plays a big role in SEO is determining better external link backs to your website. Having higher page rank domains pointing to your website, help to establish more authority within the eyes of the SERPs.
To learn more about leveraging page rank and how developing an extensive link building strategy can improve your website’s results and increase your traffic to your website, contact one of our internet marketing specialists today.
Lindsay Viscount
Owner/Creative Director
www.LongevityGraphics.com