Broken or invalid HTML
This means that the URL in question has broken or invalid HTML.
Why is this important?
Valid HTML is not a requirement for SEO. In fact, if you performed W3 HTML validation on any page on the internet, there would be some sort of validation issue almost every single time. Browsers and search engine parsers do a pretty good job of fixing or ignoring small issues, and so HTML validation is not normally something you need to worry about.
However, this Hint is related to extreme cases, where the validation issues are so severe that Sitebulb's HTML parser was unable to build a meaningful HTML document from it.
In such cases, it is very likely that the pages will not look right to website visitors, and search engines may also struggle to understand the page.
What does the Hint check?
This Hint will trigger for any internal HTML URL that returns a 200 (OK) status, and has broken or invalid HTML.
Examples that trigger this Hint
This Hint will trigger for any internal URL where the HTML document is fundamentally broken, for example:
- no <head>
- no <body>
- <body> before <head>
- <body> outside of <html>
How do you resolve this issue?
This Hint is marked 'Critical' as it represents a fundamentally breaking issue, which may have a serious adverse impact upon organic search traffic. It is strongly recommended that Critical issues are dealt with as a matter of high priority.
Since the HTML on the page is so critically damaged, in order to fix this you would need to tackle the issue with the help of a developer who is able to adjust the underlying code which is used to generate the page.
You may be able to validate the problem by running the page through Google Search Console's page inspect, which you could use to support your argument that this requires developer resources to resolve.
