- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:40:13 +0000
Mike Schinkel asked: > And at the risk of sounding snarky, can you point me to a > reference where is it codified that they are not (at least partially) in the > business of standards? Spartanicus answered: > http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com > http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com > http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tech.msn.com > > Should give some indication. A few counter-examples. Google's lazy hypocrisy [ http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/google_valid_and_strict/ ] on the issue notwithstanding, their Webmaster Guidelines do say that webmasters should use "correct HTML" to "help Google find, index, and rank your site": http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 MSN's "Guidelines for successful indexing" for site owners are buried in a fabulous Ajax help system where you can't create deep links to content (ahem), but they state that we should "Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Make sure that all tags are closed, and that all links open the correct web page." Yahoo wants "Good web design in general", which obviously (cough!) includes using valid markup: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html So all three search engines claim or imply that web standards help them correctly index the web, which /is/ their business. And as all three search engines are a blackbox, webmasters should obviously be taking them at their word. (Tumbleweed rolls past ...) -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Thursday, 21 December 2006 06:40:13 UTC