Clean Code Does Help Bing Website Rankings!
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:
- 210 web pages were checked for errors (14 phrases x 15 positions each).
- 26,040 total errors were detected using the W3C validator.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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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