W3schools.com – The Bad and The Good

Apparently, a lot of people find w3schools website useful. But with everything we know about SEOand web development best practices, w3schools’ ability to remain at the top of search results, andalso be in the top 200 of the most-visited websites in the world (even after Google’s made so manyupdates in their ranking algorithms), tends to baffle all of us.

This article is an attempt to analyze a number of things about the w3schools.com website to see ifwe can learn a few things and draw some conclusions about why this is happening.

Script Tag Madness

The code from their pages loads at least 15 different script tags, and only two load at the bottom.

Too many Scripts

Having too many scripts load in the head without combining them or minifying them goes againstthe relatively commonly known advice that you should reduce HTTP requests and put scripts at thebottom.

Inline CSS

Their use of inline CSS makes no sense and doesn’t seem to have any method to its madness. It alsolooks like at least some of it is injected with JavaScript.

Inline Scripts

There are lots and lots of elements on w3schools that have inline styles, and those same elementswill often have classes and IDs that apply CSS from external style sheets. Mixing and matchingstyles for such a large website would be difficult for them to maintain, even if they were using goodcode.

Ancient Float-Clearing Methods

Ancient float clearing methods are littered in their code. All of which could be corrected with asimple and reusable clearfix.

Tables for Layout

They use these in all kinds of unnecessary places. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but they stillprimarily use full table-based layouts for just about everything.

Duplicate Content

This is something bizarre. Why do they do this? They have duplicate content under differentsubdomains. For SEO, duplicate content should be kept to a minimum. It doesn’t seem to affecttheir rankings, but if anything, it seems to help for some reason.

Embedded Code

It’s hard to believe a tutorial website as popular as w3schools would post poorly formatted codeembedded code. But not only is it poorly formatted, it’s not even using syntax highlighting, and thathappens with just the on-page code examples in their lessons.

CSS3 is not Part of HTML5

Anyone who teaches web design should know that PNG, JPEG, or even SVG is more appropriatethan ragged HTML5 in GIF format.

BR tag Use

The <br> tag has its place, but if you are going to use it to create margin or padding-like spaceinside elements, then you’re using it poorly.

Meta Keywords

All of their pages use the exact same keywords, and so it seems to be part of their basic sitetemplate that they’ve never removed. It might be a “Just in case”

Website not Responsive

This should definitely be high on their to-do list, if they wanted to increase

Not Mobile Friendly

This should not reduce their search rankings, but they would be much more respectable with a sitethat’s more properly mobile-friendly.The Good

w3school.com

No Major Accessibility Errors

Here we start with some of the things w3schools seems to be doing right. While they do have 56‘contrast errors’ when testing their pages using WebAIM’s accessibility checker, they actually scorerelatively high, with no major errors.

Good WAVE results

By comparison, CSS-Tricks shows 3 errors and 70 contrast errors; the Smashing Magazine siteshows 4 errors and 0 contrast errors; the A List Apart site had 2 errors and 12 contrast errors; theSitePoint website had 7 errors and 42 contrast errors; and MDN’s reference turned up with 1 errorand 57 contrast errors.

Page Speed Tests

Amazingly, despite all the extra script tags in the head, every one of w3schools.com pages testswith an “A” grade using YSlow, which is pretty amazing. This is true even on the page above thatloads a full 25 scripts.

Strong PageSpeed Insights Score

They also get a strong score for their home page and inner pages on Google’s PageSpeed Insights,for both mobile and for desktop.

Conclusions

w3schools’ strong rankings are perplexing. But perhaps some of the issues above might havesomething to do with their ability to maintain this high rank. Of course, the age of their website andthe number of inbound links that they have play a major factor in their ranking.

However, consider the following:

Almost all of their pages seem to load fast, which is, of course, relevant to SEO. They use a lot ofinline CSS, that, according to recent research, could actually be a good thing for performance. Theydon’t overuse the various CSS3 and HTML5 effects, which may again keep their pages slim andfast.

They continue to use alt text for images and, generally speaking, seem to have robot-friendly pages.Even after a redesign, their website still looks like it fell out of the a 20th Century tree, hittingalmost every branch on the way down. And it’s been shown that they have many technicalinaccuracies in their content.

But things like that don’t matter to Google’s ranking algorithm. Nor does Google penalize them fortheir “old school” practices, which could be detrimental to the integrity of the search algorithmsince it contradict giving higher rankings to older more established sites, and it might also goagainst the web’s friendliness toward being backward compatible.

The fact is that w3schools has good search rankings in spite of a lot of things that would indicatethey shouldn’t. Perplexing, perhaps, but somewhere inside the items mentioned above is one orperhaps more than one KEY to their incredible string of continual high rankings.