Hi,

I have a new site which is in my profile. I just wanted to ask exactly how important is XHTML Validation for Google rankings?

I've had help from a couple of people to code it correctly, and it passes validation.

Just wanting people's opinions as to whether it's likely to be liked by Google

Some types of non-valid code may cause a bot to trip up and fail to index part or all of your content, and fail to follow links to other parts of your site.

With valid code, you know that will never be a problem.

It don't matter too much. It just has to be valid. Although they do like Updated versions and Extended Versions of coding/cgi.

To what extent does changing content matter too? And how often?

Changing content is very important. I would say monthly updates are the minimal if you want to have the status of being a fresh site with engines. Web sites that post fresh content are often spidered more frequently, this is certainly an advantage I would think worth having.

As g1smd indicated, serious markup errors could potentially become a roadblock to user agents such as web browsers and of course search engine indexing bots, spiders, crawlers, whatever they are named. The better the markup you use, the better the results can be. It pays to do the best job you can and try hard to use markup in a way that is considered valid.

For any who follow the thread and do not know what people mean when they say valid it means this. There is a governing body, the www.w3.org, with many working groups that publish standards for technologies that are used for the Internet. Markup formats such as HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML Extensible Hypertext Markup Language for example are two such Internet technologies that the www.w3.org mandates standards for. When people write programs such as a web browser or design a web page, they are supposed to ensure that the technologies they use are used within the parameters set out within the various standards published by the www.w3.org.

You likely have heard of CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, again the www.w3.org has a working group that publishes standards to govern the proper or "valid" use of this markup technology. So when you hear somebody say get your code validated they are actually talking about getting the markup used run through a program that analysis the markup against the standards published by the w3.org. If the markup passes all of the checks, it is considered valid.

See: http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html and:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri