Are Doc Types necessary?

Posted on October 3, 2007 by admin

I was reading on a forum how someone who uses Dreamweaver had never put a doc type in the first line of their HTML code and whether or not that effected their Search engine rankings.

A doc type is something like this

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
			"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">

Wikipedia de fines them here

As for whether or not they do effect your search rankings there was a bit of debate. I know that my first host’s web site never had a doc type but had high rankings.

I always did put them in even though they were not properly what they should have been.

My copy of dreamweaver doesn’t add them automatically. I’m not sure if later versions do. To read more about them and the other elements to remember to code if you use dreamweaver, I have an article here.

On another blog I found some more information.