How much impact does bad html coding really have on SEO?

[Chammy]

My client has a site that we are trying to optimise. However the code is really pretty bad.

There are 205 errors showing when W3C validating. The >title>, , <keywords> tags are appearing twice. There is truly excessive javascript. And everything has been put in tables.</keywords>

How much do you think this is really impacting the opportunity to rank? There has been quite a bit of discussion recently along the lines of is on-page SEO impacting anymore.

I just want to be sure before I recommend a whole heap of code changes that could cost her a lot - especially if the impact/return could be miniscule.

Should it all be cleaned up?

Many thanks

[Nobody1596916721222]

Hi Chammy,

I inherited a site that reported 3,184 crawl errors in MOZ and a significant number of them (nearly 600) were duplicate titles and content. I have that down to under 1,000 total errors and only 86 critical errors. I have seen my ranking grow pretty substantially and in one week had 6 pages increase over 20 positions in rank. I can share the MOZ Rank Report if you would like to see it.

So yes, it does have an impact.

[DougRoberts]

I'm sorry, I don't have any evidence from the user experience point of view,. although I would also be interested to see the results of any studies.

I will say that from a site management/maintenance point of view it makes sense to try and keep the code as clean as possible. I've been involved in project were a considerable chunk of the cost was incurred due to the amount of time and effort that was required to unravel the mess even before any new changes were made!

[Chammy]

Thanks very much everyone - very helpful.

Good point re page speed - the pages are certainly slow to load so this could well be due to the huge amount of js and bad code.

And yes, think the duplicate tags should be sorted - this shouldn't be difficult.

Has anyone got any tangible results that they've seen as a result of cleaning up js and code?

[DougRoberts]

If you've got things like duplicate title and meta-description's going on then I'd certainly take a look at fixing those. Being able to manage these two tags is vital to managing the way your pages will appear in the search results. (And your title tag is an important ranking factor).

Normally, if your page doesn't validate then it's not a major problem and search engines won't penalise you for it. If however, your page is so badly crafted that the html errors, and general page structure makes it difficult for the search engines (and humans) to read your page then you're going to suffer.

The key is to make sure that your site/page content is accessible. How accessible is your page to someone with disabilities, using a screen reader etc.

You've got to make sure that the search engines can understand what your page is about or your page won't be seen as a relevant page for any search terms...

How bad is it? How does google render the page in it's instant previews (you can check this is Google Webmaster tools)

[MarieHaynes]

I personally don't worry about bad code unless it slows down my page or can possibly make things confusing for search engines or readers.

If the title and meta are appearing twice this could be confusing for search engines, so I would change this.  But, if you've got things like an unclosed

here and there I personally don't think that's going to be much of a factor.

[webfeatseo]

Invalid code has a small effect on ranking. However, if the invalid code causes usability issues such as load time and or causes a high bounce rate then it can lower your rankings and of course cut back on conversions.

Some of it is a higher priority than others. I would say defo remove the meta keywords.

Combine JS pages. The tables while out of date is not a big issue.

If you have the time and resources then yes it should be cleaned up. If not then clean up major problems