Does Anyone Care About Validation?
Posted by Mike | Filed under Miscellaneous, SEOThis post was guest posted by Nicholas Kwan from Tevine.com.
It’s great to see that there are now more people following web standards now. However, more does not mean many; only a few as 10% of sites today bothered with such standards. Sure, it is a “sharp” increase compared to years ago, but 10 years on and people still don’t really care about standards…
What’s Validation For?
Validation is all about passing web standards, and passing it supposing enables your site to look the same everywhere. There are some pretty nice web validators out there, and you can reach them by Google.
Who Bothered?
However, the sheer number of sites failing the test is unbelievable. Take all those big boys on the Alexa ladder. Few of them bothered (notably Wikipedia and MSN).
Yahoo! | Failed | 34 errors
Google | Failed | 30 errors
YouTube | Failed | 78 errors
Live | Failed | 66 errors
MSN | Passed!
MySpace | Failed | 104 errors
Facebook | Failed | 37 errors
Wikipedia | Passed!
Hi5 | Failed | 292 errors
RapidShare | Failed | 122 errors
This is unlike “A4 Paper” which you see almost everywhere. Web standard appreciation would be almost nonexistent if not for the help of groups like WordPress promoting valid XHTML.
Fortunately or unfortunately, because passing validation is like a legacy, it makes designing templates that conform to such standards become a profitable business. Why no one cares The theory is this, “I don’t care if my site passes standards or not. As long as it looks the same, is easy to access, it’s alright. You can’t fix what is not broken.”
Does it Help with SEO?
Sadly, it doesn’t help much (if at all). Passing validation gives few direct benefits. However, it does not make your page any easier to crawl by conventional search engines. However, it does fix some of those “bugs” in your template that you thought did not exist. The poor adoption of web standards shows one thing: No one cares. Perhaps W3C should set up a web standard on SEO. Maybe it’ll get someone’s attention.
Then, Why Should We Bother?
Passing standards ensures your site look the same for years to come, be it on the dreaded Internet Explorer, or the standard-friendly Firefox. Why is this important? I’m sure most of us will not want to change our site’s template, because it means redoing all that SEO work and stuff. In addition, it gives that (short-lived) warm fuzzy feeling that you do bother about something that no one else cares.
I didn’t know about web validators. Based on this post I just ran a Web 2.0 validator on my site. It didn’t provide a score, but told me that my site is Web 3.0? Not sure what that means. What’s surprising is that it also stated that I’m not using tags. I thought I was so I’ll need to look into that.
Good post.
There are a lot of benefits to working with web standards that you didn’t list here Nicholas. Most notably: easy manipulation of multiple pages, and the ability to appear precisely as you intend on multiple web browsing devices.
So, while the numbers are down now for standards, they are sure to pick up as the web industry grows.