valid HTML and search engines 1

[gus121]

1) Do any of the current crop of search enginees check for valid html 4.0 or XHTML within the webpage in determining the position of the webpage in there index. If not do you think this is likely in the future? Would these have to conform to the W3C's specification on html structure?

2) Are search engines such as google bothered by images which have absolute links and are on a seprate domain website? What about if those domains contained webpages with duplicate content would search enginees such as google pick up on this?

thanks for your help.

Angus

 

[ChrisHirst]

regardless of the SEs it's always a good idea to have valid HTML but minor problems shouldn't affect the spiders ability to crawl the page.
Images don't really make much difference to the SEs at all and if you are not cross-linking duplicate sites using the images it should not be a problem. There would be other concerns about hotlinking to an image on another domain but it's not a SEO one. Reading between the lines I would guess that the images are on a duplicate content site otherwise you wouldn't have asked the question.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[ChrisHunt]

My guess is that there is no explicit bonus for valid HTML from the SEs, because I doubt whether they have time to fully test pages for validity. It's enough work to index millions of web pages without having to validate them all too.

However, building valid pages will make them more likely to work on all browsers - including SE robots. If your pages are invalid, there's a chance that the robot won't be able to understand them, and thus fail to spider them properly.

Valid HTML has more of a positive impact on how PEOPLE see your website, and that's what really matters isn't it?

As far as images go, I take it you mean images where the [tt]src[/tt] attribute points off-site. I wouldn't expect robots to take much notice of src attributes, but can't rule it out. If Google decide that duplicate sites are a "bad thing", they might choose to weed them out in this way.

-- Chris Hunt

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