: Pages wrapped in a form element. What effect would this have on SEO or other machine-readability? I'm helping somebody with a site and I've noticed that all the main pages are wrapped inside

@Turnbaugh106

Well as you said its semantically horrible and should be avoided, its impossible to tell if its impacting on the rankings as such as Google but it's definitely will not help rankings.

You should test the following site using the following to determine how bad the situation is:


Markup Validation (I suspect there are dozens to hundreds of errors). Some major issues could be preventing Google to reward full weight to certain elements on the page.
View the site without JS and in text, there is a few text based browsers you can emulate how Google would view the page, another way is to use Google's cache service and click text only (Top Right) - however browsers can fix problems on the page and render correctly while Google may not, so a text browser such as Lynx may be more ideal.


But again without seeing the URL viewers will not be able to answer more without taking a look which I appericate that you can't disclose this website in question. Personally and its debatable I take w3 validation very seriously and believe that Google does in fact take this into account, we already know that page accessibility and page speed count to Google's rankings so I would only assume that this is naturally the case for a validating website. As I said I suspect that because everything is stuck in a form, almost everything will be failing validation and many people could be experiencing problems depending on browser type.

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