Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the impact of poor HTML, spelling and grammar on search rankings. He gave two answers because HTML is a technical issue and spelling and grammar are quality issues that can impact the user experience.

The question:

“Do Google’s search algos check the broken HTML or spelling mistakes or grammatical mistakes, taking into account the search ranking?”

Some questions have a clear answer and John Mueller will typically answer right away.

For this question John Mueller paused to think a moment before answering.

Impact of Broken HTML on Search Rankings

He answered first about broken HTML, explaining that HTML has to be so broken that Google can’t make sense of it.

Mueller:

“Those are kind of different situations. Uh… for the most part we don’t care about HTML if it’s broken or not.

Most of the web does not have valid HTML and we have to live with it.

The main exceptions that I know of with regard broken HTML is if it’s really broken in a very bad way in the sense that if we can’t recognize that a page is mobile friendly.

Or if we can’t recognize that this is a title or a heading then obviously we can’t do a lot of things with the HTML.

That’s …kind of the one case there and usually those kinds of broken pages are very broken in the browser too.

So if you look at the page and they don’t even load properly then probably you need to fix that.

However if you look at the page and it looks normally in the browser, then even if there’s broken HTML probably that’s okay.”

#news #seo #html