Thanks for your input, I was trying my best not to discredit validation. I was simply looking at it from an SEO perspective. Yes if a clients page does not validate there is no harm in telling them, the problem I have with it is when it is sold as a ranking booster, which it often is. That’s not what validation is.

I have nothing against it and will one day start working on my 50 odd errors, however when big brands like tesco, direct line and the guardian cannot be bothered to sort it out, it makes me wonder why.

Even after all that data, we still can conclusively tell whether Google, bing or yahoo look at these as a Quality Indicator, they certainly aren’t going to devalue your listin if it does validate.

So I think its very important to atleast advise clients to there website validating. At the end of the day, its just sloppy if it doesn’t validate.. No excuses for it! Thats my thought on it anyway.

I use the thesis theme and yes I am getting around 50 errors, however some of them are due to my own lack of skills

However I use blogger for many small projects and the average template has around 300 errors, again blogger is owned by Google.

I think validation is a nice luxury if you can afford to pay someone or you yourself are good at coding, however it’s a luxury with no real urgency attached to it, as it drives no traffic to your site.

I just checked Google search engine optimization starter guide and the word ‘validation’ does not appear even once in it.

Structure, navigation, use of H1 tags etc. – these all appear – but nothing about pages that validate.

I just ran our site at Quillcards Distinctive Ecards through w3 validator and got 6 errors for the homepage.

It’s written from scratch in Ruby.

Pretty good, eh!

On the other hand, our blog at The Quillcards Blog which is on a page of the site, is built on WordPress, which must be one of the most widely used blogging platforms worldwide.

We use the Thesis theme – which is recognized as a model of good code, and yet it shows – 23 Errors and 3 warnings.

What’s more, the warnings all relate to the “Subscribe by Email” link which is a script from Google’s Feedburner.

So I think you are absolutely right about validation as it relates to Google’s Search.