Does Webpage Doctype Affect SEO?

I think that’s a pretty good question. I think it’s a good question because I am the person who asked it. I did a Google search for it a few days ago and didn’t come up with much.

A few people here and there said it’s a good idea to have your doctype match the coding that you have on your website pages. That’s pretty much common knowledge. They claimed that the search engines like it. I’m not so sure about that.

You wanna see something? Here, check out this search engine spider simulator. Find a nice website and plug the URL into the simulator and hit submit. What do you see? That’s right, just text.

As far as I know, search engines strip away all the code on your web pages and just scan the text. Now, if you have some sloppy code that is causing errors, search engines are going to have a tough time sorting through all of that and might not be able to complete the scan. That is definitely bad for SEO.

I am no expert. I can’t claim one point of view or another. All I can do is say that I have not found anything that tells me for sure whether or not your doctype affects SEO. As a good rule of thumb, you should keep your doctype up to date and keep your code clean. If you are running a CMS, keep the upgrades going and stay current on template changes. That way, you will be running lean and mean and that’s always a good thing.

Here’s one word of warning. Please be careful of following advice offered by teenagers posing as people who know what they are talking about. SEO and web design skills are developed by experience and research. As of yet, I have not found any one of these individuals who have ample experience or who have done any amount of research. By research, I don’t mean reading a Wikipedia page. I mean months of setting up systems and testing results. The internet is full of people who like to write down their “hunches.”