Web development and maintenance costs can be exorbitant for smaller websites. It is difficult for website owners to pay for the maintenance of highly ranked, Google compliant web pages and still make a decent profit. In many cases, these owners are business focused without the technical know how to understand their developers’ recommendations for the best methods of search engine optimization. Because of this, some developers are able to exploit their clients’ lack of technical acumen by overcharging for unnecessary services.

Since 1998, the W3C, the international standards organization for Internet development, has been at the center of a controversy regarding their self-appointed status as arbiters of web development standards. The W3C is made up of 356 member organizations and claims the right that all internet web pages must adhere to their stated formats and styles, thus ensuring the uniformity and compatibility of any website’s development. When a page’s HTML is created using W3C standards, that website is considered to be validated by the W3C.

A cry went up against the W3C organization when it was realized that alternative forms of coding and computer languages were being black-balled as inappropriate for the industry by these high-dollar coding creation providers. Myths about Google requiring W3C compatibility for their ranking placements are believed by many people while not being true. Google has over 200 different search engine optimization areas that come into play when Google ranks a site and W3C compatibility is not among these requirements.

Since Google SEO is not related to a page’s validated HTML or strict W3C compliance, any additional development resources spent in these areas can be wasted money. In makes little sense to spend both programmer time and programmer salary towards areas that essentially show no return in page ranking. Because Google doesn’t care whether a web page is validated according to the W3C, the website’s search rankings and user traffic do not improve because more money was spent on making a compliant web page.

Matt Cutts is known in the industry as being one of the leaders at the Google Search Quality group specializing in techniques for search engine optimization. He states that since the Google search bots have to be able to index all web pages and most of those pages are NOT W3C compliant, the search bots do not take into account any web page’s W3C compliance when determining search rankings. Ultimately there is no reason to pay extra development dollars for W3C compliance.

Related Content

Subscribe to the post comments feeds or Leave a trackback