W3C HTML Validation shows little to no impact on search rankings

[mandy]

I figured I would release some of the data from a recent study we did on the relationship of W3C HTML Validation and web page rankings....

In particular, we looked at the W3C validation of approximately 100 separate keywords in Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask. For each keyword, we extracted the top 10 ranking sites, measured the number of errors via a W3C validation check, and used multiple statistical models to determine whether the individual rankings of the sites could be associated with validation error numbers.

The more rudimentary statistics are all we needed to fairly easily dismiss the assumption that validated content will perform better in the search engines...

full article: http://www.thegooglecache.com/white-hat-...imization/