HTML Validation

[Halfdeck]

How much, do you imagine, does the HTML validation of your pages effect SE bots and indexing. Or do you think that it plays no factor at all?

We can only guess. We don't know the extent to which the SE bots can correctly spider a page with broken HTML. The only thing I assume is the major SEs have no problems crawling/indexing a WC3 Valid HTML page -- but even that's a big assumption. I've written a few parsers using regexp and I'll say its not hard for a parser to choke on some random /unexpected stuff on a page. But the final answer to your question really is "we don't know."

If you're asking SHOULD I validate my HTML pages, my answer is yeah why chance it?

[Linkster]

I do know that in the old days (LOL a few years ago) the original googlebot would definitely fall short if you had bad html like CD34 posted above - and validation was sometimes the difference between the ranking positions for some keywords.

Since that time, Google has two new bots that dont seem to be "as affected" but for the minimum time it takes to validate (something Im real bad about) it would seem like a silly thing not to do - let alone making sure that the html will render well for a firefox user vs an IE user