ASM Development - taking websites beyond design

Bing, W3C And Crawling Issues

It’s amazing how a little sentence can excite a few people in the search engine optimisation industry. There may just be reason to review your web site and its compliance under W3C. What is W3C?  This is the World Wide Web Consortium and its role is to standardize the code by which browsers interpret web pages. They set a standard and web designers try to design pages that comply – however, things don’t always turn out that way.

Often it’s not a problem. Web browsers are fairly smart these days and they can generally render pages, even those poorly written, to the screen. However, search engine bots are not quite the same. They often read the code literally and if they hit a hurdle, they stop reading the page and move onto another page, or another site.

The short sentence I was talking about came from a Bing source on a recent Bing forum post and read:

clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the SEs. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template.

This was after another reply had pointed out that someone’s code was a real mess and not W3C compliant.

Although not stating that ‘dirty’ code prevented crawling and indexing of sites, the suggestion that ‘clean’ code ‘helped quite a bit’ when it came to crawling and indexing is worth noting. Should you suddenly change your site’s template because of the ‘dirty’ code? Not so fast.

There is nothing wrong with ‘dirty’ code. However, if you do a search of Bing and find that many of your pages have not been indexed then it may be worth making a few changes. If your pages are being indexed then it is obviously not a big issue. It should also be noted that there are many reasons why a page hasn’t been indexed yet so look also at things like site age. Search engine optimisation cannot do its job if your pages are not being indexed. That has to be step one – if they are not being indexed, check to find out why.