Nearly every SEO audit tool includes a scan for html errors as part of the report. As a result, many SEOs recommend to their clients to spend resources fixing these errors. We want to find out if this is a good spend. We want to determine if HTML errors are a negative ranking factor.
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The reason why I like this test is that when you run into SEO audits, any tools that do any sort of audit, they would always come back with HTML and CSS errors as a suggested thing to fix which maybe you should. If you have a site with a ton of errors, that is a real problem and you should think about fixing that. But, is that a ranking factor? Do you need to focus on it because Google will negatively affect pages that have a high number of HTML errors?
What we found in this one is, no. We have pages that are completely clean and pages that have errors and with the test page we dropped errors on, hilariously, it jumped up to the top. The page with more HTML errors moved up in ranking. So we feel really good about saying that html errors are not a ranking factor.
Dori: It is interesting that it would jump up and not just stay the same. Would you consider that possibly it is the change in HTML? Google thought that there were changes here and the freshness of it.
That is exactly right. That is what we were thinking. When it comes to HTML and CSS errors, how I put this in my own practice - those types of errors can be indicative of other problems. Meaning, if you have hundreds of thousands of HTML and CSS errors on a site, it could be issues with how the site is displaying in other browsers.
You might have nested code that is indicative of other problems. That is how I would jump in. If you are looking at 10,000 errors for a medium site, that is nothing and I would not really sweat it that much.
Again, we are talking about resources, how much money you have to put in to a project or you are going to advice your client to get their dev. going and get them on this this this, HTML and CSS errors would probably go to the bottom of the list in terms of how they are going to spend their money.