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Valid HTML is Essential to Survival in Google
Submitted by Michael Phipps on 11 October 2007 - 2:59pm.

I discovered what happens to your search engine position when your home page doesn't validate.

Recently, Sydney Party Bus complained that their website wasn't getting indexed.  In fact it is the 11 October today, and they had not been indexed since the 10th August.  That's 2 months.  Google wasn't indexing the HOME page.  In fact the page had been removed from the search results completely.  Other pages were still getting some attention from Google.

So we started looking for causes.

A recent serve move only complicated the issue, since the client assumed since his site may have been down the last time Google indexed him, so google thought the site was no longer there.  Not true.  Google tries lots of times before it makes the decision your pages are gone forever.

Are there any pages linking to Sydney Party Bus.  yes - but only a few.

Have we done anything considered black hat?  No.

Is the page returning a 200 OK header?  Yes.

Has someone squeezed us out with duplicate content?  No.

Are our opposition attempting to cause problems for us?  No.  (They're all busy working on their own sites)

I forgot something that I didn't think had the potential of stopping google index you.  It's so obvious now.

Is the web page valid?  Ahm... why is there another open <head> tag after the <body> tag?  And it doesn't close?  Well there's your problem!

The page has been fixed.  It isn't strict HTML Valid, but it is ok.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the page to reappear in Google.

I've never seen what effect a poorly formated page could have in a search engine until now.  The results speak for themselves.

It's time to run your website through http://validator.w3.org/

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