w3c Validated Code Important?

[templateteacher]

I have been spending a lot of time on websites trying to clean up website code to pass the w3c validator http://validator.w3.org/

Most of the sites I support are osCommerce shopping carts, and boy, are there a lot of errors embedded in these pages. How important do you think it is to have clean code? It seems that clean blog type applications always rate well and it would seem that if the code was cleaner in the shopping carts, then maybe search engines would be able to better "read" and "see" what was on their pages.

[KevinJB]

Validated code is always cleaner and cleaner is always easier to read. For best results use XHTML, that forces you to use CSS and opens up whole new worlds of SEO possiblities (always wanted your sidebar on the left, but your content to appear first in your document?)

[templateteacher]

So does XHTML make a bigger difference? I have had a hard enough time getting sites to conform to the HTML 4.01 Transitional standard. When I try to validate against XHTML, I pull up over 600 errors... ARGH!

[awall19s brother]

Actually validated code is not that important.....a recent study showed that over 40% of the pages indexed on the web had some type of html error. Now Matt cutts spoke on this recently. He adviced to not worry so much about html validation than to have these other things done first. Make sure your webpages are crawlable and that you have unique quality content on your pages, than go out and market your site, than worry about cossing the T's and dotting the i's as far as getting your page to validate. Validation should be on the lower end of the priority pole in other words.

[templateteacher]

Well, the reason I bring it up is because when going through some websites that I work on (mainly osCommerce shopping sites) to improve the placement of headline tags and css, I have found that many have fatal errors that prevent search engine spiders from "seeing" the entire site.

Check this out: Major osCommerce Fatal Error SERPs

Most of those sites are only displaying about 33% of their code to the search engines, but the entire site is visible to the human eye. That got me thinking... How do robotic spiders "read" a website? If they are missing table tags and have grossly malformed code in the site, then they can't logically get the same impression of a site that a human can. Furthermore, blog sites, in addition to having fresh content updated frequently, almost always pass XHTML validation!

My theory is that is could it be the combination of the two factors that play a big role in the results delivered by blog type sites. But then again, I would need to due more research to prove it. This site (v7n Forums) has 45 XHTML errors which isn't many... Most osCommerce sites have over 200+ when you attempt to validate for XHTML...

[awall19s brother]

a search engine can figure out what your sites about without having to understand the language or even text.

[ali_420]

Don't obsess over making it valid. My HTML contains a few warnings/errors here and there but I don't care too much if everything shows correctly. You have better things to focus on.

[jg_v7n]

You will find it almost impossible to make your sites w3c compatible and also look right in all browers.

Better to concentraite on browser compatibility. Your users are more important than dumbass spiders that freak out at the slightest error in HTML.