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views:

23

answers:

1
Q: 

XML in markup, any ideas why?

I am doing some research on a motorola site and came across a ton of weird markup and wanted to get any ideas on why this is used or why it is a good idea?

Using this page as the example http://bit.ly/bRWpQX

You can view source and see tons of tags like 

<title xml:lang="en" lang="en" 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head xml:lang="en">

any ideas? how does this effect SEO and and general best practices? how good or bad is this?

the page seems to explode when I run it through the w3c validator

A: 

Chances are, the page is being built from a number of fragments and processes that don't attempt to maintain valid HTML. With a mixture of knowledge, luck and testing it's possible to build web pages that work fine, even though they're nowhere near valid.

How does it affect SEO? Probably surprisingly little. Search engine parsers have to do the same thing that browsers do, otherwise authors would exploit differences to serve one content to browsers and different content to search engines.

The success of a search engine depends on matching the search string to pages that the display the content that the user was looking for. So long as the page displays correctly, whether the page uses valid markup or not is of no interest to the user, and therefore of no interest to the search engine.

In terms of general best practices, it scores 0.

Alohci  2010-10-27 09:18:42

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