Page validation

Page validaton - to do or not do do. I am under the impression that most professional webmasters now validate their pages. When I did some research into the topic I found that there were a fair few older posts saying that "Google has pages that don't validate, therefore it doesn't really matter, if you don't have the time." I think the opinion has changed which has to be a good thing. The web has for a long time had so many different standards, and different ways of doing the same thing from a web design perspective. Making something work in all browsers is sometimes a real challenge, and the "correct" way of doing something wasn't easy to accertain.

Now we have CSS and W3C validation. I was excited when I heard about these things, because now had a way of finding out if my pages were "properly" written. I saw the whole thing as a new tool. You can make a page full of errors and dodgy coding, and it will display in late versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer without a hitch. But if you really want to do a serious site that no spider or obscure browser will have issues with, you want it to be as "correct" as possible.

Looking at it purely from a search engine perspective, many top ranked pages for competitive keywords on both Google and Yahoo do not validate, so it's not like you're not going to get ranked just because your page doesn't validate, but who's to say the search engines won't implement it in the future as a way to draw straws.

I always validate my sites. It also tells me of any careless HTML errors I've made as well. Having said that, this blog does not validate by any stretch of the imagination. I still have a pagerank of zero and getting about 15-20 uniques a day, but somehow I don't think the non validation is the reason for that. Feel free to link to this site:)