I think it's all realtive, if you can make a page standards compliant, then great, that's ideal. Pages that have a few things wrong then you're probably not going to notice a difference, however if the coding is a complete mess then yes, you could suffer in the SERPS because of it. I'd be more worries about the spammy tags personally, okay, the site probably won't get penalised becase of keyword repitition in the metas, but if that's the sort of work that they do, then it makes you wonder in what other areas are they messing up?
-- This message may have been cut off and the rest will only be shown to members. To become a member, click here --