valid html vs none valid html

[carminejg3]

ok one more question....


does having valid html affect your site being indexed? or do most search engines just skip over the html tags?

just trying to see what others think if spending a good day or two tightening up the html will actually help, or should we skip it for now?

[brian@my-affiliate-progra]

I know their are many "experts" that would agree that valid html is important for good ranking. I also know I have several "old school" site I made years ago with frontpage that rank in google very well that have html errors.

My understanding is that search engine spiders understand only the most basic of html tags and skip the rest. If google spiders had problems when reading html that had errors they would be constantly tripping over themself.

How many pages are online that have bad code? Most ...

I do think it is good to try to have the most valid code possible but I don't loose sleep over it.

My opinion ....

[Reprobate]

Personally I think you should try and get everything you can right.

If you can't, but you tried, then so be it.

I have one site where I do have EVERYTHING right.

But it took a bit of research and asking the right people the dumbest questions to get there.

I now try and do it with every new site I work on.

When I have a chance I go back to one of the old ones and give it a tweak here and there to get them right too.

[carminejg3]

well most of the errors are pretty dumb....

img tags must have an alt="" tag .... well what if its a tiny corner image that is .10 of a byte now you have text in that alt="" tag would add more unneeded page weight is why I leave most alt tags empty....


I asked yahoo about this and they did indeed respond....


In general, Yahoo! Search will try to
analyze the text and layout of your site, but as long as it displays
normal in a web browser, our crawler should not care about minor HTML
inaccuracies.

so even the engines think that some valid html errors are pointless