I can't really
blame Google for making Gmail less featured in Safari, or completely unusable in Opera... But is it possible they are
not only ignoring bad HTML when ranking sites, but actually rewarding sloppy code? Mark Daoust has set up a little test
and reports on SiteReference that
Google might be rewarding
bad HTML with higher rankings. If his report is true, or if somehow in Google's intricate (and stock performing)
search ranking code they are rewarding bad, sloppy, or just plain wrong HTML, why would someone bother to care if their
code was valid? Worse, SEO's could suggest developers intentionally put crud in their code to boost their rank! These
are long shots, and Mark's test isn't necessarily perfect, but it's a simple and somewhat scientific analysis of what
could be a problem. Even more interesting is his analysis of MSN's handling of bad HTML code. I'll save the irony of
that for when you read the article. The question is, is bad HTML evil, or just bad?
Tags: html
