Promotion Tip:
Bad Code Hurts Your Search Engine Ranking

by Christine Churchill
Keynote NetMechanic

Did you know HTML code errors can negatively affect your search engine ranking? Most webmasters don't realize that simple page errors can cause a search engine spider to incorrectly index a page or skip the page altogether. Checking your code and links before launching a page just became an even better idea.

Search Engine Ranking Determined By Relevancy

Bad code can hurt your site with the search engines in several ways. Search engines score a page by looking for relevant terms in key HTML components in specific places within a document. If they don't find them because of typos or other mistakes, the spiders can downgrade your page or leave without reading your whole page.

Incorrect document structure such as a badly placed tag - like a META tag placed in the BODY section instead of the HEAD section - can cause the spider to ignore the tag, reducing your relevancy score and subsequent ranking.

What if you transposed a few letters when typing an important tag? Say you typed TILTE instead of TITLE for your TITLE tag. Search engines place high importance on text contained in a TITLE tag. If you type the tag name wrong, the search engine will ignore the tag and all its contents!

Other errors on your page can also limit how search engine spiders index your site. Broken links act as roadblocks to the spiders. Search engine spiders index text and follow links. If they come to your site and encounter broken links, they won't be able to fully crawl your site and they may abandon it (they've got the whole Internet to index, why waste time with a site with broken links!)

A Typo Cost Me A Top Ranking!

John Bryant, a professional computer consultant and SEO in Arizona and owner of www.helpmedoc.com, told us about his experience with HTML code and search engines.

"The one time I forgot to validate my HTML, it cost me a Top 10 Ranking! I made a minor HTML error when I was updating a customer's site and it wrecked the site's ranking. The page dropped from a top ten position to page three."

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Being a perceptive professional, John immediately noticed the drop in ranking and identified the reason as an HTML error by running HTML Toolbox over the site. He fixed the error and resubmitted the page. A few weeks later he regained his original ranking.

When asked about lessons learned, John replied, "I won't make that mistake again - I always validate my code now."

Errors Hurt In Directories Too!

Problems with errors in your code don't stop with search engines- it can also affect directories. At Search Engine Strategies, the largest conference dedicated to search engine marketing, representatives from Yahoo and LookSmart specifically stated that sites with broken links and errors could be penalized or rejected. A web site maintenance tool like HTML Toolbox could ensure you avoid this problem.

How Do Errors Get In The Code?

"My webmaster knows code - he wouldn't make a mistake."

No, not on purpose, but let's consider the work environment in which your webmaster operates. There are tight deadlines, multiple people requesting changes, pressure to constantly update the site - the truth is the webmaster's world is hectic and high stress. The tired webmaster does his best to keep up, but sometimes that means making changes on the fly with little double checking (after all, it's only a minor text change…).

Consider this scenario - your Marketing Department has handed your webmaster some great new content for your home page. They have coordinated with your company's search engine optimization expert and have strategically placed keywords in the new text. In an effort to be responsive, your webmaster jumps on the task, adds the new text, but accidentally cuts off the closing bracket of a paragraph tag. So your text looks like this:

<p This is your keyword-rich text that the marketing and SEO put together….

Notice that the P tag above is missing a closing bracket. The code should really be written like this:

<p> This is your keyword-rich text that the marketing and SEO put together….

When the search engine reads your page without the closing bracket, it assumes all the keyword-rich text is an attribute of the paragraph tag - and ignores it. Since search engines put great emphasis on the visible text on your page and this optimized text was specifically added to boost your site's relevancy for certain keywords, you just lost a great opportunity to prove your relevancy to the search engines. This can cost you a high search engine ranking and traffic.

Spiders Are Low-Tech Browsers

Why are search engine spiders so picky? After all, Internet Explorer often forgives errors like this.

If you design your site for "IE Only" you are building for the most generous, most robust and error-forgiving browser around. Assuming that search engine spiders will navigate your site like IE is wishful thinking. The same things that cause your page to display incorrectly under Netscape, Opera or other old versions of browsers may trip up a search engine spider.

Search engine spiders are like browsers, but they are fairly low-tech browsers. In fact, they are roughly the equivalent of a Version 2 browser. They don't understand Flash, they don't understand DHTML, and many of them don't even understand Frames.

It is important to keep these limitations in mind when designing your Web site. Designing for leading edge technology instead of designing for universal browser compatibility can hurt you with search engines as well as non-IE browsers.

Top Search Engine Rankings Are Too Important To Risk

A good search engine ranking for a popular keyword is worth gold. Don't take unnecessary risks by taking shortcuts that could cost you a top position. If you worry about your search engine ranking, make code validation your final step before publishing your page.