Search Engine Academy of South Carolina

There has been a lot of discussion on this topic for a couple years now and we often get ask questions on just how important valid markup really is. 

Even though it is important to make sure your Web site validates mainly on a spiders ease of read your content a study done by Opera states that less than 5% of Web sites on the Web actually validate.  That leaves 95% of all sites being penalized for bad validation …that just isn’t going to happen!

So no valid validation is not one of Google’s top 200 ranking factors but it sure does make a spiders visit to your site faster if your sites code is clean and free of errors.

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We get this questions all the time from our students since Google cracked down on buying and selling links that pass page rank.

This is Googles response to that very question and the very same answer I give all our students at The Search Engine Academy of SC and Atlanta, GA.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

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