Does Validation Affect Ranking?
Does validating your code improve your ranking? The short answer is no. In fact, Google’s website doesn’t even validate.
They don’t care, and in general, it won’t affect rankings, though this depends on the type of error we are talking about. Google’s website (at the time of writing), has 65 Errors & 8 warnings.
There used to be a directive in Google’s content guidelines that they wanted “valid code”. Many people understood this to mean “validated code” however, and started panicking; editing their sites to make them validate. This fear was compounded by unethical or ignorant web designers, who jumped on the band wagon and started making erroneous claims about validation to sell SEO.
Google simply wouldn’t waste their resources to validate the html of each page in their index. This would take an extremely long time to process, and each page would have to be processed again when any changes are made. It would be a waste of time and resources for them to do this.
Nonetheless, it is still a good idea to validate your HTML code though. This ensures that your pages are accessible to everyone, despite what browser or operating system they use. It also ensures that the search engine spiders won’t have any problems crawling and indexing your pages.
Here are some genuine positive and negative ranking factors:
Top 5 Ranking Factors
Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
73% very high importance
External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
71% very high importance
Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
67% very high importance
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains 66% very high importance
Top 3 Negative Ranking Factors
Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
68% very high importance
Link Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers
56% high importance
Links from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages
51% moderate importance
