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Clean Code Does Help Bing Website Rankings!

Doug Williams @ 4:18 am

This blog entry was posted on October 6, 2009.

Clean code doesn’t seem to affect Google search rankings… but what about Bing? I decided to apply the same analysis I did with Google onto Bing search results. (See W3Cvalidation does not help website rankings ).

I took the same 14 keyword phrases. I decided to compare top ranked websites (ranked 1-5) against lower ranked sites (ranked 101-105) and also against even lower ranked web pages (ranked 201-205). Bing was used as the search engine.

I ran every web page that appeared in the Bing search results through the W3C validator and tabulated the results.

Results:

  1. 210 web pages were checked for errors (14 phrases x 15 positions each).
  2. 26,040 total errors were detected using the W3C validator.
  3. 124 errors per page average was found. This ranged from 0 errors (valid code) to 1235 errors Position 203 for the phrase “garden designer programs.”
  4. 7.14% were valid code: 15 pages were found to be valid code (7.14%). This is much higher than the Opera study of 3.5 million pages that found 4.13% of all pages checked to be valid. Compare this with my prior Google analysis which showed 4.28% for these same phrases. This indicates Bing prefers valid code.
  5. 21.4% fewer errors in first 5 positions: Positions 1-5 had 98 errors per page which is 21.3% fewer errors than the average for all pages. Positions 201-205 had the highest number of errors per page at 153.  There is a consistent correlation to errors and rankings on Bing. See the details below.
  6. Bing and Google return different search results. 43% of the time the number 1 listing would match between the search engines (6 out of 14 keyword phrases).  Only 2 of 5 results would be found somewhere in the first 5 positions (not in the same order).

Conclusion: Clean code (or at least cleaner code) seems to make a difference with Bing. It seemed to have no effect on Google rankings. Other SEO  factors are also at work, but there were a significant correlation between clean code and better results. Bing also showed many more valid coded pages than we found in the Google analysis.

Oct 4, 2009

Average code errors per page

Search Positions>>

1-5

101-105

201-205

amusement parks

22

56

242

business cards

326

162

54

Business Consulting

69

33

14

consulting firms

29

38

108

email marketing

92

55

121

garden designer programs

72

147

293

home for sale in california

121

516

330

homes for sale

77

299

347

internet marketing

77

60

239

loan modification

57

50

39

natural supplements

162

89

147

online marketing

124

67

128

website design

55

60

3

used paper equipment

83

62

83

Averages

98

121

153

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  1. W3C Validation Does Not Help Website Rankings!
  2. Website Coding Will Affect Your Search Rankings
  3. 7 Website Problems that Hurt SEO Rankings
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  5. Web Design for SEO

Filed under: SEO Strategies

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 4:18 am and is filed under SEO Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments

  1. [...] HTML Code: Bing places more emphasis on valid HTML code than Google does. Follow W3C standards while coding your website. This will not only improve [...]

    Pingback by Web Design, Seo, Blog Marketing Tips » 7 SEO Tips for Bing Search Engine Optimization — September 20, 2010 @ 4:41 am

  2. business directory…

    [...]Clean Code Does Help Bing Website Rankings! | Doug Williams SEO Services[...]…

    Trackback by business directory — November 29, 2011 @ 6:51 pm

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