Does Google’s crawler care about valid HTML?
Posted on: November 19, 2014
Webmasters and site owners know the importance of good and valid HTML in search engine optimization. Google bots crawl your site and web pages for links and indexes and screen the website for quality content. However, many webmasters are confused if HTML is one of the basic SEO elements that must be specifically used for a Google crawler to rank your page higher in Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Video Question
“Does Google’s crawler really care about validated and good HMTL? Google.com validating gives me 4 warnings and 23 errors.”
Video Highlights
Google Webmasters enlighten users and SEO providers about valid HTML and its proper use or significance to a Google bot:
- Google experts emphasise that webmasters must pay attention to their HTML to ensure that they are really clean and validate.
- Valid HTML makes your site maintainable, much easier to upgrade and more convenient turnovers if you want to hand your code off to someone.
- Google points out that the web is filled with syntaxes and invalid HTMLs and the search engine has to deal with that. Thus Google designed a bot or crawler to compensate all the errors, which are already present in the web.
- Google does not penalize you for invalid HTMLs because if that is the case, there would be tons of webpages like that waiting to be sanctioned.
- Google shared that there are invalid HTMLs and web pages due to users trying to make some tweaks here and there to improve their sites. Thus, it would hurt search result quality if Google would only include web pages with valid HTML for page ranking.
In order to improve your Internet Marketing campaign, you should:
- Take note that Google is first and foremost looking into the quality of content of the web page where users could get relevant and useful information rather than looking at whoever makes the cleanest website they can.
- Remember that for now, valid HTML is highly recommended by Google Webmasters not because it would give higher page ranking but also because it makes your site more maintainable and allows easy upgrades in the future.
- Focus on other important SEO elements such as link building! Take note that Google bot does not exclude web pages with invalid HTML because it would negatively affect search results.
