Recently I went through some tutorials in w3schools.com about XHTML.

I got the idea that XHTML is just the combination of XML and HTML. It is just some changes which has to be done to the traditional HTML pages to make it XHTML page.

Now, my doubt is that is it that the search engines especially Google rank website page according to the HTML specifications they use in the page.

Like, will a XHTML page have a more edge over the HTML page when it comes to search rankings?

Please reply me.

Thank you..!

I couldn't tell you FOR SURE whether this is true or not. I can tell you that my website gets ranked very well even though it doesn't have a whole lot of links or traffic. The little traffic I do get comes from google and other search engines. I get search phrases that I never thought anybody would use to get to my site. I really really believe this is because the W3C XHTML and CSS standards compliance of my website. There's not an extreme amount of content on my site, but anything that is on there gets crawled by google extremely fast (an hour or maybe a few hours) and I get 1st page search results for very small insignificant keywords. I also have a pretty fair amount of meta data in the head of every page on my site, so that might help too. But the point is, in my opinion, my site gets a lot more traffic than I think it should. lol. But I guess I shouldn't complain.

If you're debating whether to redo your site in xhtml or not, my advice would be to just go ahead and do it! If it's too much work, I'm sure there are scripts out there that will do it for you. Or you could just make a script yourself. I may not be sure that it will help search engine results, but I am sure that it will not hurt! You gotta stick with the times. Eventually HTML 4.01 will die! You might as well just start cleaning up your code now, rather than waiting til it's too late. Then once you get it clean you can put a nice little "Valid XHTML" link on your site.

The biggest differences are that all tags need to be closed in xhtml, all tags must be in lower case, all attribute values must be quoted, and the cascade applies, still, so there CAN be CSS in the xhtml file, because having it in the xhtml file affects the cascade, but it really is wiser to seperate the content from the styling.
Google and the other Bots prefer the xhtml files because the validated files tend to be smaller in size since the 'style information' is not in the file and the content is easier to find, identify and sort through. In a nutshell, xhtml is a stricter coding language/structure and as suggested above, you can benefit now and in the future by staying with the current recommendations. Eventually the xhtml rules will apply across the web, so either learn it now, or suffer the consequences of not staying current.