messy source, bad for seo?

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messy source, bad for seo?

jake66

6:12 am on Jul 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

is there a difference (to the search bots) between a site that has a normal source (indented, tabbed... arranged the same in your source view, as would be if you loaded the source code off the server?

example:

<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html dir="LTR" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <title>website title</title>

(see how the code is all on ONE line?

versus:

-doctype-
-lang-
-head-
-charset-
-title-

code is on 5 separate lines

i'm not talking about just the headers....the ENTIRE source on 1-15 lines, is it bad? or the bots don't care?

buckworks

6:20 am on Jul 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

Reducing the white space characters makes the page load faster for users, and I've never noticed any negative effects SEO-wise from having the source code on fewer lines.

jake66

12:43 am on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

this is a new thing to me, so can you explain what makes it load faster?

leadegroot

1:11 am on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

Because all the extraneous white space is removed, the page is smaller - thats what makes it load faster.

I've never heard of that being a problem for SEO, and have a vague memory of it helping (probably just makes it more likely the bot gets the whole page before it times out, a very uncommon error) but cannot back it upp with refs :(

Quadrille

9:35 am on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

It's only 'messy' to human eyes, trying to see separate instructions on separate lines. Spiders would be just as happy with the whole thing on one line - and as stated, it could be a mite quicker for them to read it.

However, the time gain would be so very very small, most would sacrifice a nano-second or two for code that (humanly) looks less messy, so we can find errors when necessary!

trillianjedi

10:04 am on Jul 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

so we can find errors when necessary!

FireFox "View Formatted Source" plugin.

;)