By : Nidhi Gupta

HTML code errors can negatively affect your search engine ranking. Most webmasters don’t realize that simple page errors can cause a search engine spider to incorrectly index a page or skip the page altogether. Checking your code and links before launching a page is a very good idea.

Search Engine Ranking Determined By Relevancy

Bad code can hurt your site with the search engines in several ways. Search engines score a page by looking for relevant terms in key HTML components in specific places within a document. If they don’t find them because of typos or other mistakes, the spiders can downgrade your page or leave without reading your whole page.

Incorrect document structure such as a badly placed tag - like a META tag placed in the BODY section instead of the HEAD section - can cause the spider to ignore the tag, reducing your relevancy score and subsequent ranking.

What if you transposed a few letters when typing an important tag? Say you typed TILTE instead of TITLE for your TITLE tag. Search engines place high importance on text contained in a TITLE tag. If you type the tag name wrong, the search engine will ignore the tag and all its contents!

Other errors on your page can also limit how search engine spiders index your site. Broken links act as roadblocks to the spiders. Search engine spiders index text and follow links. If they come to your site and encounter broken links, they won’t be able to fully crawl your site and they may abandon it (they’ve got the whole Internet to index, why waste time with a site with broken links!)

Errors Hurt In Directories Too!

Problems with errors in your code don’t stop with search engines- it can also affect directories. At Search Engine Strategies, the largest conference dedicated to search engine marketing, representatives from Yahoo and LookSmart specifically stated that sites with broken links and errors could be penalized or rejected. A web site maintenance tool like HTML Toolbox could ensure you avoid this problem.

How Do Errors Get In The Code?

“My webmaster knows code - he wouldn’t make a mistake.”

No, not on purpose, but let’s consider the work environment in which your webmaster operates. There are tight deadlines, multiple people requesting changes, pressure to constantly update the site - the truth is the webmaster’s world is hectic and high stress. The tired webmaster does his best to keep up, but sometimes that means making changes on the fly with little double checking (after all, it’s only a minor text change).

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