http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/the-we...ur-web-server/

At a search engine, you have to write your code to process all that randomness and return the best documents. By the way, that’s why we don’t penalize sites if they have syntax errors or don’t validate — sometimes the best document isn’t well-formed or has a syntax error.

Watch the seo spammers pick up on "best document" and "has a syntax error" all in the same sentence

Don't you know that to be the best document in Google's eyes you need a syntax error? And if you read carefully between the lines at things that aren't really there in what they said, you would know that to rank in Google you need exactly one syntax error. Still need to find out which one is best.

Oh, and while we'z at it, <h1> tags are being spammed, so you have to put everything in <h2> to fool Google. To get the top rank in Google you need

• 1 syntax error
• Lotsa <h2> tags
• Nothing but <alt> tags all over the page
• A blog
• A arctic penguin
• Photoshop

It works!!!!!

Dammit, John, stop stealing my content. Or at least if you do, put it on eBay so the laws of eBay will protect you.

Some call it stealing, I call it sampling....mmm.

That's a lot of competition for Sling Blade....!

I'll still write cleanish code because it's easier to maintain. Valid xhtml is manageable in so many more ways ... which is ironic. Browsers and spiders can chew on markup with unclosed tags all day long, but what's available to developers in Microsoft land requires well formed xml.

Nice post Chris.

A lot of our sites have ugly old code and rank #1 for the terms we are chasing... and they are WAY out of compliance.

But we've never been able to get our dream phrase: "Sling Blade"