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The Myth of W3C Compliance?
By Sasch Mayer (c) 2007

The past few years have seen a huge increase in the number of
search engine optimisers preaching about the vital importance of
W3C Compliance as part of any effective web promotion effort.
But is compliant code really the 'Magic SEO Potion' so many
promoters make it out to be?

For those of you not familiar with the term; a W3C compliant web
site is one which adheres to the coding standards laid down by
the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org), an
organisation comprising of over 400 members including all
the major search engines and global corporations such as
AT&T, HP and Toshiba amongst many others. Headed by Sir Timothy
Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet as we know it today,
the W3C has been working to provide a set of standards designed
to keep the web's continuing evolution on a single, coherent
track since the Consortium's inception in 1994.

Whilst the W3C has been a fact of life on the web since this
time, general industry awareness of the benchmarks set down by
the Consortium has taken some time to filter through to all
quarters. Indeed, it is only within the past 24 to 36 months
that the term W3C Compliance has emerged from general obscurity
to become a major buzzword in the web design and SEO industries.

Although personally, I have been a staunch supporter of the
Consortium's standards for a long time, I cannot help but feel
that their importance has been somewhat overplayed by a certain
faction within the SEO sector, who are praising code compliance
as a 'cure-all' for poor search engine performance.

Is standards compliance really the universal panacea it is
commonly claimed to be these days?

Let's take a quick look at some of the arguments most commonly
used by SEOs and web designers:

1. Browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Lynx will not display
your pages properly.

Browser compatibility is possibly one of the most frequently
cited reasons for standards compliance, with Firefox being the
usual target for these claims. Speaking from personal
experience, Firefox will usually display all but the most broken
code with reasonable success. In fact, this browser's main issue
seems to lie more with its occasional failure to correctly
interpret the exact onscreen position of layers (Div tags - this
often causes text overlap) even when expressed correctly,
than its inability to deal with broken code.

What about Lynx? Interestingly enough whilst it is somewhat more
fragile than Firefox, most of the problems encountered by this
text-only browser mostly seem to stem from improper content
semantics (paragraphs out of sequence) than poor code structure.

2. Search engines will have problems indexing your site.

Some SEOs actively claim that search engine spiders have trouble
indexing non-compliant web pages. Whilst, again speaking from
personal experience, there is an element of truth to these
claims; it is not the sheer number of errors which causes a
search engine spider to have a 'nervous breakdown', but
the type of error encountered. So long as the W3C Code Validator
(http://validator.w3.org/) is able to parse * a page's source
code from top to bottom, a search engine will likely be able to
index it and classify its content. On the whole, indexing
problems arise when code errors specifically prevent a page from
being parsed altogether, rather than non-critical errors which
allow the process to continue.

* To parse is to process a file in order to extract the desired
information. Linguistic parsing may recognise words and phrases
or even speech patterns in textual content.

3. Disabled internet users will not be able to use your
site.

The inevitable, but somewhat weak, counter-argument to this
point is that only an infinitely small percentage of internet
users are visually or aurally impaired. However, it is a fact
that browsers such a Lynx and JAWS (no, not the shark) will view
a web page's code in much the same way as a search engine
spider. From this perspective, we once again return to the
difference between critical and non-critical W3C compliance
errors. As long as whatever tool/browser/spider is used to
extract text content from a page's code is able to continue its
allotted task, the user is likely to be able to view the page in
a satisfactory manner.

Interestingly, one of my fellow designer/SEOs over in Japan has
just run an experiment entitled "W3C Validation; Who cares?"
(http://cass-hacks.com/bits_n_bytes/validation_not_important/
testing the overall importance of W3C compliance to long-term
web promotion efforts. Whilst the results of this, the world's
most non-compliant web page, do initially indicate that
compliance does not make much of a difference to a search
engine's ability to index and classify a web page, I do rather
suspect that further research may be needed in order to establish
the long-term effects of this experiment.

At the time of writing however, the page ranks well with Google
for the following two non-specific search terms; "Does
Google care about validation" and "Google care validation" - not
bad for a page which is supposed to be utterly and completely
un-indexable.

What then is the answer to the W3C compliance conundrum?

In conclusion I would say that ignoring the World Wide Web
Consortium's standards at this stage may well have negative
consequences in the long-term, as the internet's continuing
evolution is likely to place greater emphasis on good coding
practices in the future. Having said this, I would also say that
the current value of W3C compliance has been overplayed by some
professionals in the web design and SEO industries.

Further studies into the effects of non-compliance are
certainly needed.
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Sasch Mayer, a writer with well over a decade's experience in
the technology and internet sectors, is currently living in
Larnaca on the Cypriot south coast. He writes under contract to
IceGiant, a web studio specialising in W3C compliant web design
(http://www.icegiant.co.uk) in Cyprus, the UK and the rest of
the world.
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