overwhelmed

Many of those errors are minor, but many are serious.

You don’t need a college course in programming. I’d wager that few people on this forum have taken a course in HTML. Just google for an HTML tutorial. Some basics:

* Ignore the warnings about <embed> tags.
* If you’ve got a & somewhere, including in a URL, it must be written as & to validate.
* Be sure to nest properly. You can’t put a “big” element, like h1, h2, div, etc., inside a <p>. (That’s the first error that comes up.)
* Things like this are serious problems:

<p <object height="355" width="425">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-_L612od8Ng&amp;rel=1"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-_L612od8Ng&amp;rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed>
<object height="355" width="425"></object>

First, you’ve got two opening <object> tags, but only one closing </object>. Second, you start with <p instead of <p>, and several other little things.

Again, you don’t need a college course, but you probably would profit from spending a few hours on something like this:

http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp

As to your broader question about Google. Validation errors may or may not be the problem. When you move a site, you have to wait for google to re-index it and update its directory. If you want to speed this process up, then be sure that anybody who may have linked to your old URL updates their links. Google can take months to index a site that doesn’t have many other sites linking to it, but if lots of (good) sites link to you, you’ll be indexed quickly.

Another way of speeding up google indexing is to install the google sitemap generator plugin which you can find by searching the plugin section here. Then sign up for a google webmaster tools account if you have a google account already you just need to add it to your existing account, then you submit your sitemap that the plugin generates and it helps google out and makes indexing much faster.

clarkbp,

I do not think your html is actually effecting your rank that much, unless you have some major problems such as unclosed tags.

Google takes a while to index your site. If your URL has changed, than google can’t tell your website is the same as your old one. Thusly the rank does not transfer. Since the google rank depends on links pointing to your site, and your url has changed, your rank has been wiped clean.

You will probably have to wait a few months before people start linking to your new url. I thinks it’s only natural that your rank has started off at zero for the new url. I would recommend putting a “This site has moved: please update your bookmarks” link onto your old blog.

You might want to sign up for google webmaster tools to check your site’s status if you haven’t already too:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools