W3C - How much weight does this carry over a site?

[G10]

Hi there,

Sorry if it's a daft question but I have to ask.

I have read that if your site is not full W3C compliant, it could have an affect on SE crawling your site. Is this true?

This in mind, I ran a html validation check and found numerous errors whithin my coding www.doseuk.com. (It's my first site so don't shoot me just yet eh!)

Does this really having an impact on sites and if so, where can I get a free checker that can also assist a newbie to go through and fix these errors?

Ok, so it's 2 questions.

[awall19]

some people will only link into sites that validate. its kinda like a cool guys club, but generally if the page renders in the browser and is generally structured correctly and has a decent linking campaign it can rank high even if it does not validate.

this makes me sound bad, but most my pages don't validate and I rank #1 for search marketing and am in the top 10 for search engine marketing on both google and yahoo

[G10]

Thanks awall19,

Just a few nerves creeping through on my side as I am still new to this.

So basically you can still get your site listed very high even though it doesn't meet the w3c criteria.

Thanks for the advice.

[awall19]

yulp, at least my sites are (in a fairly competitive industry)

[hatchet]

Let's see if any of the search engines validate...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww....com&verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww....com&verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.msn.com&verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww....com&verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww....com&verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww....com&verbose=0

I could go on but it's getting boring. If nobody wants to click on the links - not one of them validates.

[RonHollingsworth]

My ecommerce site which has been around for a while has never been validated w3c and I'm #1 for a few keywords and in the top 3 for an additional 6.

[greg]

w3c standards are a bunch of bull. Some of the stuff that they require is a waste of time, though I actually think the only thing keeping me from validating is an alt tag, i might do it just to say i did

[scisoft]

We validate width XHTML 1.1, but SE are not the reason.
But validation is usefull for inexperienced webmaster - if the site validate, it is certainly crawable by SE. It is also true that only small fraction of non-valid sites are not crawable by SE.