xhtml and seo

Hello,

We just had an SEO trainer come in and he said that he wasn't aware of any particular sites that were done in xhtml and were also successful in seo. But xhtml evangelists claim that xhtml should be much better for seo since you can dispose of all the tables and a lot of other junk from your code. Does anyone have any idea how well the crawlers treat xhtml pages?

Thanks!

"But xhtml evangelists claim that xhtml should be much better for seo since you can dispose of all the tables and a lot of other junk from your code."

It's funny when you present an argument where both sides are wrong, I have to admit. XHTML does not equal tabless page construction, it just means that the html used on the page conforms to the xhtml standard. That's all it means.

But in answer to your question, do non-bloated, cleanly coded pages tend to rank well? My experience is yes they do. But that's a function of using CSS well, it has nothing to do with which doctype I'm using.

Personally, I tend to use HTML 4.01 srict for commercial sites, and xhtml 1.0 strict for less commercial sites, although it varies. It depends mostly on how the site will be maintained long term, and by who, and by the technical specifications of the site, for example, if I need to use the 'target' attribute on links for example, it would be xhtml 1 transitional, not strict. Etc.

However, keep this in mind: there is nothing more stupid and absurd than to call a page html 4 strict or xhtml 1 strict if that page is not error free, it's just stupid, that doesn't stop people from doing it anyway of course.

Because the odds of error creeping into xhtml are higher long term I tend to avoid it where I won't be the only one maintaining the site, or where the site is fully automated, which xhtml character replacements etc.

Hey lizardz, thanks for your reply.

Yeah, I mentioned getting rid of tables because that's the way I had been using xhtml recently. Especially because some of the pages I was fixing had been done sloppily/hastily in Dreamweaver and had way too many nested tables (they just weren't necessary) and tons of unused/redundant font tags. For the record, I have no problem with Dreamweaver and have used it off and on for years, even if only to highlight the place I want in the html... Haste was really the issue here.

I share your concerns about coding xhtml and turning it over to the fates, with nearly a guarantee that the fates won't be too excited about getting jiggy with xhtml...

Anyway, I've been searching around other discussion areas and the consensus so far is that html vs. xhtml doesn't make a significant difference either way as far as seo goes. Which I suppose is just fine.

I've been searching around other discussion areas and the consensus so far is that html vs. xhtml doesn't make a significant difference either way as far as seo goes.

You couldn't have said it better. The search engines don't care whatsoever what your filenames are and what you use to create the content on your site. All they really care about is whether they can crawl the page and see its content.

For SEO purposes, that content has to be comprised of text that the search engines can read. And to be honest with you, as long as you've got great content you'll be fine. A lot of the important ranking factors nowadays are now off-site factors rather than actual on-page factors anyway, so what filetype you use and what software you use to create web content doesn't really matter anyway.

I'm not using XHTML until all of the issues regarding the MIME type have been sorted out.

I have no need for anything beyond validated HTML 4.01 at present, and forseeable future.

For some applications xhtml is fun though, I serve it where appropriate with the correct mimetype, it's pretty easy to do. For xhtml supporting browsers, currently only Firefox/mozilla and Opera, it makes a very easy way to validate your pages, since true xhtml served as application/xhtml+xml will fail on html errors, with error line numbers simply by viewing the page. Kind of convenient, faster than going to validate the page.

But commercially, it's just not that good an idea. Besides, if the code is clean and error free, doesn't use deprecated elements etc, you can switch an entire site over to xhtml with only a few regular expression search and replaces. And switching an xhtml site to 4.01 requires only replacing the doctype and then doing a single search and replace through the whole site for ' />' -> '>'.

Since MSIE is not currently supporting xhtml mimetypes, it's pointless doing this commercially.

OK I'm a so called "SEO Expert" and an supporter of moving everything to XHTML.

I've done lots of test with XHTML and SEO and here are my finds.

XHTML on it's own doesn't do anything (good or bad) to rankings. However, by using XHTML properly, you have the ability to organize your content in order of priority (i.e. h1 tags first, followed by valuable content, followed by useless stuff). You then use CSS to format the layout.

What I've discovered by doing this and not changing one word of content, my rankings for some pages improved dramatically, while other (the ones already in the top 10) didn't move.

Also by writting valid XHTML or even HTML 4.01, you make sure the bots know how to read your page and you've removed one of the many road blocks to effective indexing.

So any SEO expert that tell's you to avoid XHTML is blowing smoke.

kology, your points about correctly coded html have nothing at all to do with XHTML at all, zero.

The benefits of correctly coded HTML of any type are in my opinion fairly significant, but using the xhtml doctype incorrectlty, like probably 99% of xhtml sites do, is pointless. Maintaining an xhtml website, especially if anyone else who is not up on what xhtml is actually for deals with the on page code, is generally very problematic.

In other words, I'd rather have a validating html 4.01 transitional site than a non-validating xhtml 1 strict site.

Personally, I like XHTML, I use it quite a bit, but only on sites where I will be the only maintainer, or where the pages are completely dynamically generated. I especially like using real xhtml, with accept header testing, that makes debugging the site pages for coding errors a breeze.

As you correctly noted, there is no particular seo benefit at all to using the xhtml doctype. There seems to be a lingering confusion about what xhtml is, when it comes to CSS, there is no difference between HTML 4 and XHTML 1, you can make a CSS/P site in either doctype, zero difference.

One of the real advantages of XHTML, besides the ability to quickly detect coding errors, is that if you at some point decide to move the onpage data to some type of true xml, with xslt processing, you don't have to do any work on the page content html if the site is already xhtml compliant. But this means ZERO errors.

One benefit of XHTML: When it does become the standard (and like all dynamic media, it will), it will weed out the designers and programmers that are too lazy to adhere to a standard.

I think XHTML can actually hurt SEO ranking. It's not because the language standard or errors in coding, but because of the dynamic nature of the content you're loading. If you are implementing an AJAX framework like adobe spry, the search bots will not execute script. So basically, any content that is loaded from the XML file is not read.

I found this out after implementing spry to manage photo galleries. The image alt attribute is loaded dynamically into a page, but will not be used by Googlebot-Image.

It doesn't (and shouldn't) matter what the site's framework language is. The search engine should only be concerned with the context of a web page and how that is relevant to the user.

The search engines seem to be a bit behind on this though. Google allows users to upload XML site maps. Shouldn't the bots be able to pick up an XML doc that tells where all the content is located?

That doesn't mean you shouldn't migrate to XHTML as a framework, just be aware that the relevant terms you are after should still be written on that page. If I'm wrong on this, then I could really use somebody's help.

Hi leftcoast and did you realise this thread is nearly 3 years old? 0_o

Anyway, XHTML shouldn't make a difference to your sites as long as there are no 'road blocks' so to speak, PHP and ASP are completely dynamic and index and rank fine.

I've never heard let alone used Adobe spry so I'm unsure how that works, but dynamically calling alt tags for images is hardly new, could you expand on how it calls alt tags?