Afraid to clean up some of my code....does it matter

[jseville]

I have a list on my homepage of recent blog posts. However when I look at the code for it much of the old <a href=URL... are still partially in place after having been erased in the CMS so they don't really show to the public eye.

I want to clean up this list and some of the old half codes that are there but I'm afraid to possibly mess up some rankings. Paranoid I know.

If I clean up some bogus <a href...... code that isn't complete (wasn't erased properly) will it matter to rankings? I'm afraid google is reading some of it (keywords) and maybe it is helping rankings???

jay

[JennSellsFast]

Jay I'm no code expert, but I sought advice on this matter about 6 months ago. My SEO consultant told proved to me how clean code is part of good rankings. I have also read that before the BigDaddy update spammers tried to plug in multiple <href codes to try to fool Googlebot. I would clean it and see what happends. It can't hurt. Good luck!

[Ryan Ward]

Maybe you could do a test on a secondary page that you have decent rankings for. Clean it up and wait until it gets spidered, cached and reranked before you clean up the whole site.

[VRI]

My SEO consultant told proved to me how clean code is part of good rankings.

I'd like to see that evidence as there is more than an ample supply of sloppily coded sites ranking well.

[ericbramlett]

I think it *might* make a difference w/ MSN, but Matt Cutts has stated explicitly that Google doesn't care about clean code. IMO, it's not worth your time to chase MSN rankings until you're ranking well in Google.

[hastings]

I think it *might* make a difference w/ MSN, but Matt Cutts has stated explicitly that Google doesn't care about clean code. IMO, it's not worth your time to chase MSN rankings until you're ranking well in Google.

Thats right google only cares about content and links. Cleaning up the code would not hurt you at all though. It would only help.