Take It Or Leave It

[espmartin]

I was just reading a post on the Google Webmaster Help Group
about a site that the owner believed was penalized, and so
he lost his rankings on Google. A senior member advised him
that he should clean up his markup, as it was full of errors.
The site owner was declaring XHTML 1.1 as his DOCTYPE!

The guy blew the advice off, and used Yahoo and Google as an
example of a site with invalid code being popular in searches.
Well, of course those sites are, just by the sheer size of
them! So basically, the guy offering his help "washed his
hands" to it, but it got me thinking...

How do you take constructive criticism? Especially one that
can save your site from possible monetary suicide?

[SkinnerW]

I am always open to suggestion if it's constructive. In your example I can fully understand guy's frustration - some people so obsessed with validation so it can drive everyone else crazy...

No one could provide any prove so far that fixing one or another validation error will improve page SERP...

[temi]

Perhaps the guy offering help was just being nice... but like Skinner said, there awful lot of sites with invalid codes that ranked quite well in search engines so that could not possibly be the reason the site was penalized.

I also can see the point from the angle of the guy who rejected the advice..... my site was once rejected by a directory once, the reason was that I do not have an address on the site, I was rather furious because this directory does not have addess anywhere on their website either..

[xhan]

I like getting helpful suggestions but I'm very fussy about what goes on my site, all my code is valid though.